Large Animals in Everyday Life (4 page)

“I'm trying to get out of the country,” Joe said. Helene noticed his dark whiskers, dark lashes. “I'm on standby for half a dozen flights,” he said. “Anywhere warm. And you? Wait—let me guess. You're a college student, right? Home to the folks for Christmas? No—I'll bet you're going to Palm Beach with five friends who look exactly like you, only blonder, right?

“Well, close,” Helene said. “Phoenix. But I'm not a student.” She was making her yearly visit to an old high school friend whose parents ran a guest ranch.

“Always good to get away for the holidays,” Joe said. “Go somewhere hot and foreign, where people don't get so worked up.”

Helene sipped her vodka and 7-Up and silently agreed. She loved the tropical, slowed-down feel of life at her friend's ranch, even though she knew it was inauthentic, produced by a paid staff for the tourists. There was something, nevertheless, about the palmettos and prickly pears and the birds that ran up and down on the footpaths that seemed to mock the guests and all their serious human activities. Helene supposed if you grew up surrounded by these crazy plants and wild pigs and coyotes howling like sirens in the night you might not feel so starved for extremity. You might just calm down and get on with your life. At any rate, she always came back to the Midwest. She had to
admit that what she loved about Arizona was probably only the novelty; you couldn't base your whole life on what the foliage happened to look like. “So what do you do for a living?” she asked Joe.

He told her he was the voice of time; he had made a local telephone time recording. They'd paid him a fortune for that, he said, and before that he had worked in a burlap bag factory that burned to the ground. He wore a stylish double-breasted suit, Helene saw, and he took his cigarette smoke up through his nostrils. “Are you also an artist?” she asked.

“Oh, Christ, no,” he said.

Embarrassed, Helene glanced at the TV, on which an interviewer was now leaning forward toward his guest, saying, “So, do women
dig
conflict?” “You know,” Helene said, “I don't go around picking up men in bars.”

“Don't sweat it,” Joe said. “You think innocents are any more
pure
than we are?” He paused dreamily for a moment, then said, “You're just a little something God sent me.”

No one had ever said anything like that to Helene. She slid her napkin out from under her glass immediately and got a pen out of her bag and wrote down her phone number for Joe. When her flight was announced he kissed her on the forehead and wished her good luck back at college. She was halfway down the long corridor to her gate, her heart pounding, before she realized she hadn't corrected him. She thought of a phrase from one of the astrology guides she'd worked on:
When the student is ready, the teacher arrives
. At the gate a group of noisy, bright-jacketed teens were jittering around restlessly, clutching homemade posters that read
WELCOME HOME, AMBER!! IF YOU'RE TAN, JUST GO BACK
!!! I was never that cynical, Helene thought. I don't ever want to be that cynical.

Before Joe, Helene had only one other boyfriend. He was younger than Joe and much more ambitious. His life's work, he knew at twenty-five, was in the public sector. He was very principled about certain things. He made Helene feel ridiculously
important and minuscule at the same time. “I'm so proud of you,” he'd say to her, “with that little job of yours.” Once they had an argument which ended with him standing over her, kicking her in the side. The argument started over a TV program Helene liked, and ended with him shouting at her that she must learn to live in the real world. She thought, at the time, that he was trying to help her.

Remembering that time in her life makes Helene's stomach turn as though the earth has suddenly reversed in its orbit. She wishes she could pull the rug out from underneath her memories. She is smart enough to know about things like taking charge, responsibility, Oprah Winfrey, about independence being the redemption of the modern woman. But certain of her longings she cannot seem to eliminate. She would just like to
locate
her faith, get it down to a science, like packing her lunch each night. Jan, at work, seems disgusted with her. “You know what you need to work on?” she asks Helene rhetorically. “Your relationship with your
self
.” Another of Jan's favorites is: “We all cause our own happiness and unhappiness, and the sooner you accept that, the better.” But Jan might as well be from Mars as far as Helene is concerned. She lives alone, Helene knows, and is constantly modifying her diet, eliminating sugar, adding brown rice, as though health is a mountain that need only be climbed, as though appetite is of no consequence whatsoever. She is active in small political organizations that support distant and obscure causes, and she often urges Helene to “get outside” herself and come to a protest or a rally. At the office, Jan snaps Polaroids at parties, keeps the money for the football pool, and gets mildly involved in everybody's business. Helene supposes she herself is too self-involved, too busy tallying, stockpiling, looking for various affirmations, to get up much steam for Jan's type of activities. She supposes Jan has a point. Helene is, after all, tired of so much craving.

Early one morning, an unassuming spring dawn, Helene gets up and goes into Joe's chilly bathroom. She has slept at his apartment
only two or three times so far. There on the edge of the sink sits his bar of soap, plastered with dark short hairs from his head. She feels like she's seen his diary, or a hidden scar; she can't believe his body let this happen. She can't believe the soap let this happen. She can't believe she's allowed to see this. By the time she tiptoes back into the bedroom it is filled with light. She eases under the comforter, unsure if Joe is conscious. “What happened to you?” he mumbles.

“I found salvation in your bathroom,” she says, trying to make it sound like a joke. She watches Joe slip so easily back into sleep, and quiets her heart, trying, as hard as she's ever tried anything, to match his slow deep breathing.

• • •

Joe has been engaged to be married twice in his life. The first time was to a precocious girl who wanted him to help her hold up a Circle K store just outside of Amarillo. He didn't go through with that plan, but they did drive all over Texas together in a Vega loaded with half-empty liquor bottles and assorted ammunition. Every town they stopped in they charmed people. The girl wore a football jersey that said “Mikey” on the back, and Joe wore a string tie that fastened with an enormous lump of turquoise. Men in filling stations kept calling him “Mikey” when he paid for gas. Eventually, the girl decided to go back to school, and made this clear to Joe one night by throwing a folding chair at his head. He recovered and met an internationally known runway model at a party in Houston where he tended bar. The model's father was a Nigerian statesman who had survived the revolution there, money intact. He seemed to like Joe's offhand wit, or perhaps his taste in clothing; at any rate, it was decided that Joe would marry the runway model, who was actually only seventeen. This engagement lasted three weeks and then the model shaved her head and tried to shoot her father. Her father bought Joe a one-way plane ticket to a Northern city. This was all
going on in Joe's life at the same time Helene was a ten-year-old making God's eyes out of yarn and sticks at summer camp.

Joe doesn't recall the exact moment he first laid eyes on Helene, or anyone else, for that matter. It's been a long, long time since he was surprised at the way people entered and exited his life. Some people might even consider him detached—a doctor once told him: You refuse to dip your toe in the stream running right outside your own front door. It's unfortunate, but that's how it is. There are a thousand ways to get by, Joe knows, and nine hundred and ninety-nine of them involve messing other people up. Truthfully, he doesn't feel unfortunate at all. One thing he's noticed is that if there's anything worse than bad memories, it's the insidious good ones. Remembering too far back makes his heart feel like a balled-up washcloth. His heart hurts, his head aches, it hurts to look out the window and smell October coming. Who needs that kind of pain? Not Joe, who once stood on the roof of the Sears Tower wearing only a loincloth, and another time served paella to Natalie Wood. When you let go, life is one fabulous day at a time.

He wishes Helene could learn to relax, though he doesn't see it as his business to teach her. He wishes she wouldn't think about their ages. He knows she thinks a lot about loving him, what it means to love him, and he wishes she wouldn't. His love for her isn't anything he thinks about; it's like a birthmark—he would never doubt its permanence. One night he broiled a chicken for their dinner, and when he cut half from his plate for her she stared at him so intensely he told her to stop it, she was being too romantic about the whole thing. But this was a mistake; he doesn't want to tell her how to act. He would no more patronize her than patronize his own big toe. “Think about moving in with me,” he says. When he sees her expression, he says, not unkindly, “Jesus, here we go.” But then she laughs, and he thinks:
Maybe there is hope
. He can't focus on all her fears, all her trying, who she thinks she is or who she tries so hard to be. He sees only Helene, and senses the inevitable unknown, waiting, as
it always does, for the right moment. Which is okay with Joe, because he can wait forever.

• • •

Summer is over, and Helene is not sleeping well. She wakes up in the middle of the night and believes she is missing a self. She's positive there were two, and now there's only air next to her in the bed. One is supposed to be the child, and one the woman. Which one is still here? She hasn't decided whether or not to move in with Joe, and it's driving her nuts. During the day she rushes impatiently through her rituals; she spends less time on her hair, less time at lunch, and less time actually working. She finds ways to streamline, to take shortcuts in her work. She is definitely hurrying, but hurrying toward what?

“You sure are jumpy,” Jan says.

“I know it,” Helene says. “If I could just figure out what to do about the Joe situation …”

“Oh, situation schmituation!” Jan says. “You're still
in
love with him.”

“What are you talking about?” Helene says.

“You've got to get past
that
, if it's going to work,” says Jan. “Every relationship should have its disillusionment.” She picks nonchalantly at the edge of Helene's desk blotter.

Helene is suddenly annoyed. “There's a big difference between you and me,” she says. “You're divorced!”

“The difference between you and me,” Jan says, “is that I know how to have a good time.”

Lately Joe has been suggesting that they shop for furniture, but Helene has a revelation: she suggests they go buy that goldfish he's been wanting. They drive way out in the west suburbs on a mild Saturday in September. The day is clear and warm, but rather fainthearted—the smell of fall is everywhere. They drive so far they have to pay three tolls. From the outside the Pet Castle looks like a regular building, but inside the decor is lush and
confusing. Neither Joe nor Helene has ever seen anything like it; it looks like both an enchanted forest and a Swiss chalet. Walnut beams crisscross overhead, and a waterfall rushes down from the second level. Tropical birds scream from the rafters, and the pond is crowded with goldfish. Joe looks disappointed.

“What is it?” Helene asks.

“I don't know,” he says glumly. “In a setup like this, they can never catch the one you want.”

“Maybe they'll let you catch it yourself,” she says. “Do you know what you're going to name it?” She's assumed Joe is the kind of person who comes up with witty names for pets.

“Nothing at all,” Joe says. “If you name them, they just die. That's the whole secret behind goldfish.”

Helene nods and walks away so he won't see her looking taken aback. She squeezes between customers and rows of cages. Excited children keep bumping into her.

An animated woman with a tiny terrier under her arm is chatting with a salesperson. “My puppy's fine now,” Helene overhears. “The instant we get in the car, he just goes right to sleep.” The salesperson nods vigorously. “That's as it should be,” he says with a heavy European accent.

Helene finds the kittens, her favorites. There are at least twenty of them, squirming and crying in a big glass showcase lined with newspaper. They climb all over each other trying to get close to her. She sees one kitten step right on another kitten's face. This is not a good advertisement for cohabitation, she thinks. The European salesperson arrives at her side and says, “You want to hold?”

“Oh, no thanks,” she says. It would just make it impossible. Once she held it, she'd have to keep it. And she doesn't even know where she'll be living in one month's time. If only they were literate, Helene thinks suddenly. She wouldn't mind having a pen-pal here at the Pet Castle. But what could you write to a kitten? How would you explain to it why it couldn't come live with you? The salesperson wanders off and the kittens mew
frantically. Helene wonders if they are as innocent as they appear to be. “I doubt it,” she says aloud.

From behind her, a small raspy voice says: “I doubt it.”

She whirls around, and there's a smug black myna bird on a perch. “What the hell,” she says. The bird edges toward her, then edges back. “Tell me something else,” Helene says, but the bird is silent. It bobs its head, shakes out its shiny black wings, lifts its feet and sets them down, one small round eye trained on Helene. It is definitely telling her something, but what,
what
? But maybe its strange movements are enough; maybe this, the fact that she and the bird are speaking to each other, is all she is supposed to know. She turns and sees Joe up on the second level, grinning at her and waving a goldfish in a plastic bag. Maybe this is what life will be like with him, she thinks. One small miracle after another.