Killing It

by Camas Davis

  He looked me up and down and said, rather exasperated, “But you are such a beautiful woman. Why would you do that?”

  I suppose a different kind of woman might have been flattered, but I was not.

  At least he’d bothered to ask me why. Back home, most people I told this to pretended they hadn’t even heard me. Or, sometimes, they’d ask whether I was joking.

  There were exceptions, of course. There was Will, the furniture maker I’d jumped into bed with shortly after ending my ten-year relationship with Tom. Will, whose half-finished house I’d recently moved into after losing my job as the food editor and managing editor of a scrappy city magazine in Portland, claimed he understood. Even if he was disappointed that I had to leave the country to pursue my interest. Even if he sensed that my decision signaled a deeper unrest.

  My oldest friends, who, over the past twenty years, had grown used to watching me make unorthodox decisions—I’m going to Nicaragua to organize female farmworkers; I’m going to teach creative writing in a women’s prison in Rhode Island; I’m quitting magazines to get a graduate degree in performance art at NYU; I’m going back to magazines as a food writer—were rooting for me.

  And my father, a lifelong hunter and fisherman, who handed me my first pocketknife and taught me how to gut a fish when I was nine, was excited for me to eventually share my new skills with him—that is, if he ever brought an elk or deer home again. Ever since he’d switched to bowhunting in my adolescent years, the pantry shelf normally reserved for his homemade venison jerky had grown bare.

  On the other hand, my mother, a woman who ate and cooked meat on a regular basis but refused to touch it in its raw form—when my father wasn’t around to transfer the chicken breasts from their Styrofoam package into the frying pan, she relied on gloves or tongs—strongly objected.

  “I can’t believe my baby is going to become a killer,” she said more than once. “It sounds so dangerous.”

  And then: “When you come back, are you going to get a real job?” she’d ask. A real job. As in a woman, a pencil skirt, a laptop, a lifestyle magazine. Legitimate, sensible work for a modern, urban, thirty-something woman like me.

  “I don’t think so,” I told her.

  Most people, however, simply met my news with confusion, usually in the form of a blank stare. It was as if the very word itself—butcher—was so completely foreign to them that they did not deem it worth their energy to comprehend.

  * * *

  —

  I WAS USED to people responding to me this way. I have an unusual first name, such that if, upon introduction, I tell you my name and you just nod your head and move on with the conversation, I know that you have no idea what my name is and probably don’t care to know.

  But if, like me, you are the sort of person who is interested in the stories behind the names of things and you ask, “What kind of name is that?” I’ll tell you the long or the short of it. That it’s a wildflower that grows prolifically in the Pacific Northwest, where I grew up. Or that it was a major staple of the region’s American Indians, who dug up the roots and baked them in the ground like potatoes. Or I’ll tell you it’s a wild lily, Camassia quamash, and that there are two kinds—the purple, edible kind and the white, poisonous kind—and that they bloom for a very brief period in the spring.

  Or, if you really seem to like a good story, I’ll tell you that when my mom was pregnant with my twin brother and me, she was driving south on I-5 with my dad, out of Eugene, Oregon, where, a few months later, Zach and I would enter the world, and they passed a sign that said CAMAS SWALE. They thought Camas would make a nice name for a girl, except they didn’t want to name me after what amounted to a drainage ditch that ran under I-5. It wasn’t until they came upon a field of purple camas flowers in Idaho and someone identified the flowers for them that they decided to name me Camas, after the flower—the stem, the petals, the pistil and stamen, the root, the food, the poison.

  “So I’m really named after a ditch,” I’ll tell you.

  “That’s not really true,” my mother always reminds me. But I tell the story anyway.

  If you want me to keep going, I might even tell you I actually rather like having been named after a natural or man-made depression whose sole purpose is to collect the world’s runoff, filter it, and then spread it horizontally across the landscape. Concentration, filtration, diffusion. Editor. Butcher. There you have it.

  Just as when I tell people my name, when I told people I was going to France to study butchery, I was attempting to tell them a story. What was it about this particular story, I wondered, that confounded so many of them?

  * * *

  —

  OF COURSE, if I’d had a sense of humor back then, I would have understood how funny it sounded: Girl breaks her own heart. Girl loses job as a magazine editor. Girl seeks a more authentic life. Girl starts killing animals. But broken hearts and wrecked careers have a way of turning a girl rather serious, so it didn’t feel all that funny to me when I waved goodbye to everyone and flew to France.

  By going to France I would, of course, be forcing myself to struggle with whether or not to turn animals into dinner—one of the more controversial subjects we face as modern, first-world human beings. But it wasn’t controversy I was looking for. I was looking for an unmediated, uncompromising honesty with myself, with my community, and with the world at large—an honesty I felt I’d lost over the course of the ten years I spent as a lifestyle magazine editor. In picking up a knife, I desperately wished to divorce myself from the world of magazine writing. I no longer wanted to write about the genuine article. I wanted to be the genuine article.

  I also wanted to reconcile the opposing poles of my childhood—my dad’s fishing boat, my grandpa’s bright-orange hunting cap, my mom’s sprout-and-cream-cheese sandwiches, my hometown’s predilection for tempeh and tie-dye. As a child, I’d spent weekends hunting and fishing with my grandpa and dad, both genuine articles in their own right. I have memories of dragging dead pheasants through thick woods, dew-soaked deer carcasses swaying from trees, hooked fish knocked dead in the head with a small baseball bat we called the Fish Whacker—“to ease their suffering,” Dad always said. But, much to my father’s dismay, I’d turned vegetarian in my teenage years, mostly because everyone around me in the liberal college town of Eugene, Oregon, seemed to be doing it. By the time I met Tom and we moved to New York City, in 1999, I was eating meat again. By then it had been well over ten years since I’d climbed into my dad’s fishing boat or eaten Great Aunt Helen’s chicken-fried venison. I ate meat, but, like most Americans, I was completely removed from the processes that brought it to my table, even if, as a food writer, it was my job to ask where that steak came from. This remove nagged at me, but I did little to remedy it.

  In so many ways, my entire life felt this way. The choices and decisions I made—to stay in a career that made me unhappy, to stay with a man whose vision of the future did not include me—felt rather more automatic than thoughtful, more convenient than meaningful.

  * * *

  —

  SOMETIMES WE MUST CLIMB UP to a high perch and dangle our very identity—everything we’ve deemed certain and continuous and reliable and safe in our lives—over the edge. We must open our hands and let go of all of it, and then listen for the awful sound it makes when it hits the ground. Only then can we go in search of meaning.

  I broke my own heart. I wrecked my career. I went to France to confront a reality I had, for most of my life, chosen not to. A black hole opened up in front of me and I stepped in. It was crowded and noisy and hard to see in that intimidating, liminal landscape, a landscape roiling with difficult sacrifices, certain deaths, untold complexities. But stepping into that landscape was one thing. Remaining long enough within it to rake its depths for meaning was another thing entirely. Black holes, after all, according to some theorists, have the potential to becom
e entirely new universes. But not without painful contractions and compactions followed by a blinding and expansive undoing, the theorists warn, shaking their fingers at us, furrowing their brows.

  “Why would a beautiful woman go and do something like that?” the man on the plane had asked me.

  “It’s complicated,” I told him.

  Somewhere over the Atlantic, a flight attendant asked, “Chicken or pasta?”

  “Does the pasta have meat in it?” I asked.

  “It’s vegetarian,” she said.

  “I’ll take the pasta, then.”

  The man with the wilted silk handkerchief raised his eyebrows. He had no more questions for me. I was beyond his comprehension. Like my name, it all took too much explanation.

  THREE

  While our pilot circled above Toulouse, waiting for a signal to land, I gazed out at the French sunset, which turned the city’s buildings the color of fresh cream, the roofs all rust-colored ceramic tile. I’d read on the airplane that Toulouse is known as la Ville Rose, the Pink City, but the city was awash in a lipstick ocher, the sort of deep dusk color that appears on the horizon after a day that has seen both the sun and the rain. From above, the city was a humble, honest beauty, earthy and solid, to be sure, but sultry in her way.

  Once I was down on the ground, walking through her innards, where pedestrians and bicyclists and men and women on mopeds ruled the streets, she expressed a much more frenetic, cosmopolitan bustle. Hailing a taxi, I noticed my hand was shaking, the physical manifestation of a nervous brain assaulted by an onslaught of new information.

  I had one night in Toulouse before moving on to Agen, where I would meet my host, Kate Hill, an American who’d lived in France for more than twenty years and scratched out a living teaching people like me how to cook and eat and butcher the Gascon way. I’d met her only once, in Portland, but she hadn’t even flinched when I called her up and asked, “Do you know anyone who could teach me how to butcher a pig?”

  After checking into my hotel, I took advantage of what little time I had to wander the banks of the Garonne River alone.

  But as I walked along one side of the river, I worried: surely, on the other side, something was happening that I should not miss. Hence when a blushed brick-and-stone bridge finally presented itself, I crossed over, pausing briefly to look down at the muddy brown water, which appeared, in that strange blue hour at the end of the day, as if it were not moving at all. Once on the other side of the river, I immediately felt as if I should have continued walking on the bank I’d been traversing before, and so, when another bridge presented itself, I crossed over again.

  Perhaps this is how I should find my way to Agen, I thought: by following the Garonne, crossing every bridge I came to until I got there, flipping one side for the other. Maybe I’d keep following the river all the way to its salty mouth in Bordeaux. Now that would make a good story.

  I no longer had to write about where I was, of course, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I hadn’t done enough research before I arrived. In fact, I hadn’t done any, and my fear was that I wouldn’t have the right experience now that I was here.

  Eventually I turned away from the river toward the city lights, realizing for the first time since I’d landed that I was alone in a foreign country, with no one else to answer to. I wasn’t a journalist any longer. I didn’t have to look for anything if I didn’t want to. I didn’t have to pass out business cards to every chef whose food I ate. I didn’t have to order the most representative dish on the menu. I could even make terrible choices about what I ordered and there would be no consequences.

  I turned a corner into an alleyway lit from above by bodega lights. The last time I’d wandered the streets of a city in France, I was with Tom in Paris. We’d sat down at a cheap bistro and ordered a carafe of tart red wine and an onglet, hanger steak. Tom, a classics major who could string together sentences in ancient Greek and who loved the tricks language can play on us, couldn’t remember how to say “medium rare” in French. The waiter kept asking, “Bleu? Bleu?”—the word, we later learned, for “rare”—to which Tom kept saying, “Rouge! Rouge!” and laughing. The waiter didn’t think it was funny. It’d been more than a year since Tom and I made the painful decision to leave each other. I’d supposedly moved on. But as I moved farther into the alley, I wished that Tom was walking next to me.

  Save for an old man emptying a carafe of red wine at a bistro table by himself, I was alone in this alley. My footsteps turned suddenly loud and hard, as if someone had just cranked the volume up on whatever scene I’d walked into. The man sipped his wine and stared at me without blinking as I passed him. I made an awkward attempt to walk on the balls of my feet in order to quiet my step. Walking too hard had lost me my job. Who knew what other sorts of trouble it could get me into.

  * * *

  —

  JUST A FEW MONTHS before I stepped into that alley in Toulouse, the new editor in chief at the city magazine in Portland where I’d worked for three years called me into her office.

  “People in the office have been talking to me about you,” she informed me.

  “And what is it they’re saying about me?” I meant to sound neutral, but my sarcasm immediately took over. This wasn’t the first time I’d been called into her office to be told that so-and-so had a problem with me, although by this point I was pretty sure my editor in chief was making most of these problems up. “Pretty sure” being the key phrase. Sometimes I left her office convinced that I was in fact a conniving contrarian on a mission to overthrow her magazine government and undercut anyone who got in my way.

  “They’re saying that you walk too hard,” she said, in that apologetic tone people use when they tell you a piece of lettuce is stuck between your teeth. “And, frankly, I have to agree with them.” Her little black Scottie dog, Mimi, who was recently rumored to have urinated on our staff common-area rug, yipped as if to emphasize her point.

  “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.” Ever since the new editor in chief’s recent arrival, most of my colleagues at the magazine had barely been capable of questioning a headline in front of her, let alone lodging a complaint about the tenor of my step. But maybe they had offered this information freely. Maybe I did walk too hard.

  “I’m not kidding,” she said. “I need a managing editor who doesn’t stomp around all the time.”

  I stared at her in silence for longer than one is supposed to in these situations, waited until her face turned a bright, splotchy red, then left without saying another word.

  “She hates me,” I said to my friend and colleague Jill, the magazine’s second-in-command, with whom I’d just spent the past year voluntarily working long hours to hold the magazine together without an editor in chief and with no pay raise.

  “I’m pretty sure she hates me, too,” Jill said.

  “I think she’s going to get rid of me,” I said. “And you know what? I don’t even care if she does.”

  It was true: I didn’t have any energy left to care anymore. I was done. It’d been a shit year. After I’d moved out of the house Tom and I shared, my therapist diagnosed me with depression and put me on Celexa. On top of that, I was drinking a bottle of wine a night and chasing it with Ativan just to get to sleep, but I rarely stayed asleep for long, because I’d repeatedly begun to wake up in my lonely World War II–era apartment with the arched doorways and wooden floors that echoed when I walked on them, convinced that someone was standing over my bed, looming over my sleeping body. My therapist tried to convince me it was my childhood self attempting to contact me. I, on the other hand, knew it was a malevolent ghost who wanted to bash my head into the wall.

  “Why does the ghost want to bash your head into the wall?” my therapist asked.

  “Because suffocating me wouldn’t be shocking enough,” I remember saying.

  When I wasn’t dreaming of menacing night
visitors, I dreamed of teeth. Broken teeth. Rotting teeth. My teeth transformed into fangs that jumped out of my mouth and bit my face.

  I read recently that the part of our brain that registers the excruciating pain of a very bad toothache also lights up when we are heartbroken. Losing Tom felt like having someone yank out all of my teeth with pliers when I wasn’t looking. The loss left me howling, ferocious for months—nay, years—after. I believed my night visitor was on the hunt for more teeth, even though my mouth was empty now, save for my tongue, which obsessively ran itself along my mouth’s interior in an attempt to master this new, devastating absence.

  After Tom and I left each other, I’d stayed single for a short while, but I eventually began sleeping with Will, a kind, enigmatic, handsome furniture maker, with an impressive grasp of poetry and metaphor, who also had mold growing on his bathroom ceiling and a chewing tobacco habit. Falling in love with Will was kind of like getting dentures—which is a terrible thing to say, but I mean it in the most complimentary of ways. I was relieved to have a sturdy, reliable set of teeth back in my mouth—I felt the fit was quite snug—and the phantom pain mostly gone, but at the end of each day, I stood in front of the bathroom mirror and remembered that these teeth were merely a simulation of the ones I’d had before.

  Will was kind and loving in his way, but in time I knew his love for me greatly outweighed my ability to love anyone, including myself. What I secretly wanted—without really ever being able to admit it to myself—was to quit everything and everyone and descend into a deep, dark hole. Being unemployed, accountable to no one, doing nothing, sounded like bliss.

  * * *

  —

  TWO DAYS LATER, our editor in chief called Jill and me into her office and said she was letting both of us go, faking tears the whole way, telling us what a hard decision it had been, blaming it all on the recession.