The Animal Girl (11 page)

“He sure is.” Diana was cooing at him, speaking in a baby voice, which irritated Leah. Once shaved, her dog had lost a subtle measure of dignity, seemed partially naked and skinnier than Leah had guessed, and cooing at him did nothing to compensate for this fact.

“I've got a vein,” Diana said, and she sunk a needle into his shoulder. Ten Bucks yelped, but was quickly distracted by the ball that Max now let him mouth. At this point, Leah usually left. But because she had made things difficult that day and because she wanted more than anything to leave now, she felt obligated to stay.

The dog made no protest until the sedation began to take hold and he whimpered. He gazed up at them with a look Leah could not place at first, and then saw that it was fear. Max seemed to sense Leah's need for an explanation. “It's not feeling any pain. It's just a little scary for the animal when the drug begins to take effect.”

“Oh,” Leah said.

“Such a good boy.” Diana was still speaking in that baby voice.

“Please don't talk to him like that,” Leah said. Diana gave her a cool look, and Leah understood she'd overstepped her bounds. “Sorry,” she added in a quiet voice.

Before Max began to cut, he made Leah wear the same turquoise-blue medical mask over her nose and mouth that Max and Diana wore. What followed was mortifying to watch, though surprisingly bearable. Leah could handle it. She could take it. Ten Bucks was out, his head thrown back on the table, eyes closed, and tongue dangling from his mouth. With his laser scalpel, Max sliced through the soft, white belly, making his incision to the left of the dog's penis. He worked quickly. Following each rapid cut, Leah took in the odor of burnt flesh and something else, something she hadn't experienced before, the earthy, sulfuric scent of the animal's open body, its hot insides. Max described the anatomy as he worked, but Leah could see only a scarlet chaos of blood and flesh. She nodded. She uttered
variations of the affirmative—
Yeah, uh-huh, I see
—to Max's instructive comments, even though what she felt was a typical, girlish disgust. She wanted to turn away, throw up, faint even.

When it was over and they had deposited Ten Bucks into a large yellow bag labeled Medical Waste and Diana had rolled the bag on a cart into another room, Max looked at Leah with concern. “How was that?” he asked.

“That was interesting. I've never seen a gallbladder before,” Leah said. And Max seemed reassured by her answer.

That evening, Leah allowed herself to be coaxed to the dinner table. She wanted to appease her father, to show him she'd listened to his request of the other day. She was also a little spooked and on edge, and felt relieved to escape the isolation of her room. She couldn't stop thinking about that dog, about the way Ten Bucks had responded to her roll-over command by doing absolutely nothing. By sitting there and looking expectantly, its eyes expressing a terrible eagerness to please. And so Leah found herself at the table hoping she'd be distracted by conversation, by company and good food.

Noelle, who'd changed out of her business suit, looked great in a floral sundress that showed off her toned shoulders and her small waist, a dress that most women in their late forties could never have worn. Noelle was aware of it, too. She was proud of her body—too proud, Leah thought. Nearly every day, Franklin would tell her how great she looked. In fact, he did so now, and his compliment turned on her smile as if he had flipped a switch. Yet as beautiful as Noelle was, she was nervous. She was always nervous around Leah. Dumpy, slovenly, seventeen-year-old Leah, who shouldn't have given this woman a moment's pause, made her clumsy and cautious. And when Leah sensed Noelle's vulnerability, she became all the more hostile. At the moment, for instance, Noelle was watching Leah carefully without seeming to do so. She watched as Leah took a serving of wild rice and a serving of coq au vin—chicken with red Burgundy sauce, Noelle had just explained—and finally a serving of broccoli raab. “With butter and lemon,” Noelle said, though Leah hadn't asked. Noelle watched as Leah took a taste of each. She knew exactly what
Noelle wanted from her, and she usually wouldn't have given it. But tonight Leah did. Tonight, she looked up at Noelle and told her her food was delicious, as, in fact, it was. “Even the green stuff tastes good,” Leah said.

And though she'd meant it, she saw her father look up at her suspiciously. She'd never freely offered a compliment to Noelle.

“I really do,” Leah said. “I like it.”

“Thank you,” Noelle finally said.

A long silence followed in which the bare sounds of clattering knives and forks, of chewing, swallowing, and drinking, could be heard too loudly. No doubt to put an end to the crude sounds, Noelle asked Leah what she'd done at work that day. “I don't want to talk about it,” Leah said. Franklin gave her that look again. “I don't. I'm not just saying that to be a jerk.” And now the evening was going wrong, despite the fact that Leah wanted it to go right for once. There was no conversation. Everyone felt awkward and looked down at their plates. So Leah told them the truth. “I demeaned an animal,” she said. “I demeaned it and then I killed it.”

“That will do,” Franklin said, raising his voice.

“I did,” Leah said. “I'm just telling you what happened.”

“Okay,” Franklin said. He clearly didn't believe that she was being honest. “Maybe we could discuss something else.”

“I like Noelle's food. I like it a lot,” Leah said again. But she was irritated now and couldn't hide it. Noelle smiled, but no one said anything for a while. Because it was clear to Leah that the dinner was ruined, she decided to shut up and let Noelle and Franklin carry on their own conversation about a closing Noelle had completed that day. Leah would have remained silent and that evening would have come to a usual and dull end had Noelle not turned to Leah at the end of dinner with a question. “What do you think your father would look like without his beard?”

Leah had known this was coming. That's all she could think. She had known it and had even warned her father. Noelle had asked the same questions about his clothes, his hair, his shoes, and had, with this kind of rhetorical innocence, changed him completely. “I like his beard. I like it a lot,” Leah said too insistently.

“I do too,” Noelle said, though she was staring at Franklin now, studying him, imagining him without it.

“He's not shaving it!” Leah hadn't meant to yell, but it was too late. Franklin was upset. She saw it in his face and heard it in his voice.

“I'm not?” he asked her. “Are you sure of that?” He seemed to think that what he was about to do was funny, a simple joke. He put his cloth napkin on the table, excused himself, and headed down the hallway to the bathroom. By the time Leah got there, he was facing himself in the mirror and holding a pair of shearing scissors. Gobs of thick brown beard were falling into the sink. The scissors made a crisp, resolute click and snap. “Daddy,” Leah complained. He shut the door and locked it. Leah felt her chest tighten and the tears rise, but she pushed them back. She banged on the door. “Don't do it,” she said. He didn't respond, so she charged down to her room and stayed there until she could no longer bear the silence, the cramped aloneness of it. Upstairs, Franklin was still locked in the bathroom and Noelle had not moved from her place at the table. Leah sat back down and said nothing for what seemed a very long time. Finally Noelle said in a voice that was far too sweet, “That was unexpected.”

Bitch, Leah thought. And then, without looking at Noelle, she said it, with a deadpan tone that made the word all the more brutish. “Bitch.”

When Leah looked up, she saw that word working its effect on Noelle. She saw the shock in Noelle's face, a frozen moment of hurt. Noelle struck Leah then. Not hard, though hard enough for the unexpected blow to sting, hard enough to make Leah scream out, “Noelle hit me! She hit me!”

Franklin came out of the bathroom, one of Noelle's peach-hued towels draped over his shoulder. The evening sun was still out, and he stepped into a spot of it in the hallway as if to show himself more clearly. His beard was entirely gone; only a few bright curls of shaving cream remained at the edges of his face. His brooding scruffiness was gone. His shadowy, deep-set eyes were gone. He seemed to have lost half his age, half his weight. His jaw was surprisingly strong and handsome. A moody graveness had left him. He almost seemed to float down the hall and into the clean whiteness of the kitchen. “She hit me,” Leah said again, though without much volume or conviction.

Noelle stood behind her chair at the table, wringing her hands, looking stunned, ashamed. “I'm sorry. I …”

Leah felt a flash of sympathy for her, which, thankfully, was replaced by resentment as soon as her strange father looked at Leah. “What happened? What did you do?”

“Me?” Leah said. “I didn't hit anyone.”

“Yes, you.”

There was exhaustion and frustration in his voice, and Leah couldn't stand there and hear it. She bolted out the front door, slamming it behind her, and stood in the yard beneath the huge maple, its branches fluttering in the light summer breeze. She waited now for her father to run after her, to ask for an explanation of her rude behavior or, better yet, to apologize for what his girlfriend had just done. But the door remained closed. It was quiet, far too quiet. She kicked at the air. She felt that she should have been crying, bawling, but she couldn't summon the energy for an all-out fit. She considered her options. She could walk back into the house and face her father, or she could flee, she could run away, head west, for California, for the beaches and docks, for the deserts and mountains. Or she could head east, for the big cities, for the cramped streets, the bars and clubs with lights and loud music. But she was too old to run away. She didn't even want to run away. She couldn't care less about the West or East or anywhere else. Next year, she'd have to leave for college, which she was hardly looking forward to. What Leah wanted most was to stay home, to sit down in her room, unbothered, lock the door, and smolder there.

Because Leah had no friends and needed to go somewhere that evening, she headed to Max's. Max lived on the other side of Stadium Street, about a twenty-minute walk through parks and quiet neighborhoods. She hadn't been there for years, since before her mother's death, but the house was the same: a simple yellow two-story midwestern Victorian, two windows facing the street downstairs and one sullen window upstairs. A dingy white-picket fence separated the front yard from the sidewalk. Max was out cutting the grass with a push mower. It was mid-evening. The sun edged low on the horizon,
just above a storm cloud, from which Leah saw a flash of lightning. But the sun still had heat in it, and the first raindrops were lukewarm and tiny. “Hey,” Leah said.

Max wore a floppy straw hat that made him look more folksy than scientific and the same blue scrubs and T-shirt—it said
Take the Pepsi Challenge
and must have been twenty years old—he'd worn at the lab all day. On his feet, as always, were his scruffy tennis shoes, now grass-stained. He greeted her with far more friendliness than she'd expected, waving, then inviting her in. How strange it was to see Max pop his shoes off, the laces still tied, in the linoleum entryway. The sight of him in his white socks felt at once homey and intimate to Leah. Max was a neat freak with absolutely no taste in furniture and interior design. In the living room, Leah walked over an orange shag carpet, then sat in an old, if perfectly preserved, La-Z-Boy, a wooden paddle at its side. Leah gave it a tug, laying herself out flat beneath what she saw now was a thickly textured ceiling. His house was stuck in the seventies. He no doubt owned a waterbed.

Max came out of the kitchen holding a bottle of beer, obviously for himself, and offered Leah a soda pop. “How about a beer for me, too?” Leah said, though she didn't care for the taste of beer.

“That's not going to get me in trouble with Franklin, is it?”

“No,” Leah said. “Franklin is pretty cool with that.” In fact, he was cool with it; he allowed Leah to have an occasional glass of wine with dinner, in the belief that parents should teach children to drink responsibly.

Max returned with a beer for her, and when he sat down on the couch, Leah noticed something outright grim: two spots of black on Max's scrubs. “Is that blood?” Leah asked.

Max looked at his pant leg. “I'd guess so.”

“From the dog?”

Max nodded.

“Oh,” Leah said. Outside, the rain was coming down harder now, thumping against the roof, even as the deep orange of twilight poured in through the windows. “I came to apologize for my antics today. For naming the dog and everything.”

Max finished taking a swig of beer. “Apology accepted.”

“It was an insult to the animal's dignity,” Leah continued.

“I'm glad that you see it was problematic.”

Leah took a large gulp of her bitter, unpleasant-tasting beverage. “It didn't really hurt him, though, did it? As far as he was concerned, I just let him out of the cage and gave him companionship.”

“I see,” Max said. “So you did it for him. You did it to make him more comfortable.”

“All right,” she said. “It was a mistake. I'm sorry. Now I'm going to shut up.”

But she couldn't shut up. She was no good at shutting up these days. She gave him a critical look-over. “You're a terrible dresser,” she said. “My dad used to be a terrible dresser, before he met his new girlfriend. Before he fell in love. It was because he was depressive. I bet you're depressive. I bet you take Prozac or something.”

Max chuckled. “Really? You think so?”

She hadn't expected her words to bounce off him, and the fact that he remained untouched by her sudden honesty made her want to find his soft spots, his vulnerabilities. “I do. I think you're brokenhearted.” Leah took another long drink of beer and tried to look mean as she did so. “I think you never got over your wife leaving you. You never even tried to date other women, did you? My dad did. It only took him a few years, and then he was crazy in love. I wish he'd been more like you.”