Moo (54 page)

Keri knelt down and looked into his still shining black eyes, then ran her hands over his enormous feverish head. Hesitantly, she began to scratch his ears.

He gave another great shuddering breath that froze and hovered in the cold air, and then he closed his eyes.

D
EAN THOUGHT
the picture of the hog was funny. Of course he wouldn’t admit that since entering therapy, but Joy saw him smile as it passed his gaze. Now he was deep in the Sports section, and there it was across the table from her, unavoidable. Another dead animal. She was in therapy, too, and thinking Another dead animal in that way was very bad for her, so she looked down at her grapefruit. Arrayed around her grapefruit were five bites of Dean’s “Country Sunshine Big Breakfast” that she would have to eat before they would be able to leave the restaurant: hard scrambled eggs, a piece of biscuit, a spoonful of hash brown potatoes, a half-strip of bacon, and an elderly strawberry from far far away. Dean, under the influence of his therapist, had gone from haranguing and lecturing her to nurturing and supporting her. Long breakfasts at Denny’s were part of his program.

Joy’s program involved choosing not to dwell on negative thoughts. That, and waiting for the medication to take hold. Her therapist had advised her to think of herself as an earthquake victim, trapped under a fallen roof beam (her mood). She didn’t have to take responsibility for the earthquake or the structural damage to the building. She only had to make choices that would lead to eventual rescue—calling for aid, maintaining hope, taking care of herself, guarding her strength, sustaining her faith in the drugs, which she was to imagine as eager, highly-trained German shepherds, barking excitedly as they closed in on the little dark room where she lay captive.

Of course it didn’t help that the university had notified her that the equine management program was being cut, and she was to sell the university horse herd. She personally was being transferred to the Large Animal Hospital, where she would be taking care of patients, mostly equine, but some bovine. She would suffer no cut in pay. That was what she was supposed to focus on, no cut in pay. That was the sunny side of her street.

The sunny side of Dean’s street was that he was finished with
competitive, destructive, soul-destroying careerism, and intended to develop his long-buried and much-atrophied female side. As a shortcut to this end, he was teaching himself to write, throw a ball, use a knife or a scissors, and press the buttons on the TV remote with his left hand. His efforts were extremely helpful to his therapy, he reported. Just the previous night, his therapist had divulged in spite of herself that she had rarely seen a patient, maybe never seen a patient—and she had been doing therapy for fifteen years (that could be seven or eight thousand patients, which would put him in the 99.97th percentile for her patients alone)—break through to his vulnerabilities as fast as Dean had. He was sure it was the right-brain training, and there would easily be an academic paper, or even a best-selling book, a program, a video in that.

And of course, Joy, as a born left-hander, had an inherent understanding of a whole realm of thought and feeling that Dean was only beginning to discover. Together, with Dean guiding Joy toward wisdom that she already possessed—!

Well, the possibilities were endless.

But the first thing he had learned in his new life was easy does it, one step at a time, slow and steady wins the race.

Joy downed the bite of hash browns and suppressed a sigh. Sighs, Joy had discovered, made Dean crazy with worry.

She put the bite of eggs onto the bite of biscuit and made herself chew it up, then swallow it. The truth was that between Dean and the two therapists, all she had to do was follow instructions and wait for her chemical rescue. Depression, which was what she had, would gradually lift. Her ruminations of the last six months, which had at least seemed true, if not reassuring, would turn out to have been contentless. The vessels of thought would fill, of their own accord, with a rosier, bubblier liquid as soon as the drugs kicked in. Even this feeling she had to contend with lately, that she had been at last cheated of everything, would drain away and be forgotten.

She picked up the strawberry by its limp stem, flipped it back and forth with her finger, then put it in her mouth. She could barely taste it. She chose not to think a negative thought, that the strawberry was tasteless, but to think rather that her taste buds, now strangely inert, would sooner or later perk up.

Dean put down the newspaper, smiled at her supportively, and after that, she couldn’t actually see the hog, she could only choose whether or not to imagine him.

• • •

H
ELEN HAD
two yearly rituals that worked as her spring tonic. She always planted early potatoes, usually a yellow boiling variety, on St. Patrick’s Day, and she always threw spinach seed out the back door onto the remaining snow around the fringes of the patio. The spinach that resulted from the icy, gradually warming conditions of the snow-melt would be especially moist and dark green, sweet, succulent, and filled with vitamins, perhaps as early as the first week in May.

Of course there was pruning to do, and raking back the mulch to expose the black innards of her vegetable and flower beds to the warming rays of the sun. And there was the postequinoctial sun itself—Helen liked to feel the prickle of it on her scalp, and the responding inner surge of vitamin D going into production. All of these activities had, in the past, been guaranteed to act upon the waiting self, like smiling in the mirror acted on sadness—mere performance raised your expectation of imminent delight.

But this year, the fact was she was merely doing it. She could not bring to her progress around the yard the stateliness or significance or focus of years gone by. She didn’t take the time to cut the potatoes into two or three eye-sections, but planted whole ones. She let the spinach seed fly in bunches that would have to be thinned later. She forgot to look for snowdrops, crocuses, pungent moist onion shoots. She shivered in the cool wind and hurried so that she could get back inside.

Inside, however, there was no fire in the grate, no book half-read, waiting to enthrall her again, no stockpot simmering, not even the simplest loaf of bread rising on the radiator. Inside, outside, nothing to look forward to, and, to tell the truth, no forward-looking spirit. Was this an omen of the marriage she had agreed to? In the weeks since Ivar’s proposal, she had come up with no reason to get married—that is, no reason except the one—that their orbit had brought them so close to marriage that were they to rocket away from it now at her insistence, the delicious, many-layered comfort of the life they had made for the last five years might vanish altogether.

After tossing the seed, she paused for a moment, waiting for some burgeoning, springlike thing to happen to her spirit, but the flat, bleached sky held as little promise as the frozen ground and the impersonally cold and steady wind, which was the sort of wind you imagined might blow on Mars.

• • •

M
ARGARET WAS
on the phone with the chairman of the English department at the University of Wisconsin. She kept trying to speak in a normal tone of voice, but it was impossible. The knowledge that her colleagues were passing in the corridor outside her closed door was too disconcerting. The chairman said again, “I’m sorry, Professor Bell, but could you speak up? I’m having a very hard time understanding you.”

“I said, ‘I might actually consider a junior position.’ ”

“Oh, goodness me,” said the chairman. “I am sorry. We made that hire. The, uh, deans felt that we just simply couldn’t afford you.”

“Oh,” said Margaret brightly, hiding how deeply she felt the painful pop of the stimulating, diverse, and desirable bubble that had been her imagined future in Madison, Wisconsin.

A
SSOCIATE
P
ROFESSOR
T
IMOTHY
M
ONAHAN
looked up from the memo on his desk (“… regret that all promotions are frozen for FY 90-91 and into the foreseeable future”) and shouted, “Come in!” and the door opened, and an extremely odd-looking woman stepped inside and started removing her coat. Only after she said, “Hola,” did he realize that he was looking at Cecelia. He gasped.

She said, “Why does it seem colder today than it has all winter? I feel like I can’t possibly get warm!” She let the door slam behind her.

Tim set aside his lingering distraction over the memo he had been reading and made himself look past her. Her hair was gone. The thick, curly mass that always seemed to be about to spring free of its pins and combs had disappeared, only to be replaced by a much diminished head that reminded him of an eggplant or pumpkin covered with AstroTurf. He said, trying to make his voice sound helpful, “You know, you lose sixty percent of your body heat through your scalp.”

“I knew you would notice!” she exclaimed.

“I noticed.” He sounded glummer than he had intended, since he didn’t care about his promotion anyway, and he hadn’t actually been singled out—

Cecelia sighed. “Believe me,” she said, “this started as a trim.”

“It’ll grow back. I mean, won’t it?”

“She just didn’t know how to cut it, and she kept trying to even it off, and then she got panicky, and I got panicky, so we looked in
some magazines and this is what happened. When she was finished, she cried, so I couldn’t.”

“Won’t it?”

“What do you think?”

“I THINK it will grow back.” He made himself sound more confident. “Of course it will grow back.”

“But this is a sign. The first thing she said was that she had never seen hair like mine before. I think this is a sign that I should go back to L.A.”

“Oh, Cecelia—”

“No. I mean it. It’s not working out for me here. And I just got a notice that my class size is going up again in the fall, to forty students. How do you teach a foreign language to forty students at a time? That’s an educational forced march! And then, a year after that I come up for review. How do I teach a hundred and twenty students per semester with any sort of care and still rework my dissertation so that I can get all the articles and the book accepted that I need to have to show I deserve tenure?” She ran her hand over her bristly head and jumped up. “But why should I want tenure? I can’t even get my hair cut! I can’t even get warm or make friends or feel like this will ever in a million years be my home! Why make the effort? Why bother?”

The first thought that leapt into Tim’s head was, Because I wish you would. On the other hand, self-improvement-wise, he was trying to get away from the first-person point of view, move toward something more detached and omniscient-like. So he said, benign, judicious rather than pushy, selfish, “What are the possibilities out in L.A.?”

She sat down again, leaned back, lifted her heels onto his desk. “You know, Tim, that’s the question of the century. I’m serious. When I was in L.A. for Christmas, I was looking at that album my mom gave us all, with pictures of my grandparents and my aunts and my mother, and the first car and the little trees, and to tell you the truth, I couldn’t figure out how in the world we ever got to L.A., how it came to be that my parents CHOSE our life there. Well, of course they didn’t! They ended up there. I come from a family who could have LIVED somewhere, but instead just ended up. HE used to say—”

Tim made a disapproving noise, and his eye strayed to the memo again. He turned it over so he wouldn’t be tempted to read it.

“I know I promised to stop talking about him all the time, and I have improved, haven’t I? But this is important!”

“Okay, okay.”

“United Fruit DID drive the farmers out of business! Cash crops DID kill the town they grew up in! There WAS nothing for them to do after four generations except move on! And moving on is what L.A. IS for, but that doesn’t mean you want to be there!”

Tim shrugged, demonstrating knowing skepticism at this analysis. But he couldn’t sustain his habitual manner through the sadness of her next remark: “Now it’s my turn to end up.”

He sighed.

She crossed her ankles. She ran her hand over the top of her head. She winced. “To tell you the truth—”

They exchanged a look and Tim could see that they were thinking the same thought. Here. Ending up here was not to be desired, preferred, wished for. Then, just then, with that look, her mood passed to him, and he saw his own future: stuck at associate professor, living in a rental, his students getting younger, his writing getting repetitive, his trips to New York getting more desperate, his circle of former lovers widening until it covered the whole campus like a pond, shallow and rank.

“It’s that hog,” he said. “The picture of that dead hog on the front page of the paper. Maybe”—but he heard his own voice, and his own voice sounded suddenly thin and hopeless—“maybe something will turn up.”

M
RS
. L
ORAINE
W
ALKER WAS NOT
accustomed to the position she now found herself in, regarding Just Plain Brown from the business side of his large mahogany desk. A person who preferred to sit, she was standing. A person who preferred to ask questions, she had just answered some. Now he beamed upon her, unchangeably good-natured.

He said, “My dear Mrs. Walker. An organization is a delicate thing. I like to think of it as a field of balanced dynamics, energy shooting in all directions, but yet energy constrained and utilized. This, this is a field sensitive to the slightest distortion, where the least little wrong thing—a backwash of energy from an unauthorized source, for example—sets up a profound trembling in the whole.” His hand rested, relaxed and comfortable, on a printout of the library budget. Underneath that, Mrs. Walker knew, lay a printout of the athletic budget.

“You might say”—he continued joyfully, clearly elaborating on the
theme closest to his heart—“that an organization is a sleek, predatory animal, a panther, its eyes shining, its muscles rippling beneath the thick, glossy fur, all its attention focused on the LEAP, the SINKING of the TEETH into the NECK of the PREY—! But our panther has an illness. Certain cells have grown out of their assigned place. You would call that a cancer, would you not, Mrs. Walker? For isn’t cancer really an insubordination, and isn’t insubordination really a cancer? Are you with me, Mrs. Walker?” He leaned across the desk, openly trying to lock her gaze onto his.