The Animal Girl (15 page)

Because she had taken extra care in her appearance and felt that it could easily crumble, that she could lose all her elegance in one wild swing of a bat, she refrained from playing and stood behind the high chain-link backstop and watched. It was a mild day in late August
with a light breeze, a seamless blue sky, and a full, if not quite hot, sun, a day in which the chill of autumn, still distant, could nonetheless be felt. The great maples that bordered the park lifted countless pale green leaves that shimmered in the light. Tree cotton whirled through the air. In the distance Leah heard a siren, but it was faint compared to the urgent calls from the infield of “Hey, batter. Hey, batter, batter, batter.”

Leah was surprised by the competitiveness of these scientists. They wanted to win, none more than Max, who turned out to be a powerhouse. When he stepped to the plate, the outfielders stood farther back. And though Diana threw a fierce underhand pitch, winding up and throwing strike after strike, she couldn't keep her boss from hitting a three-base grounder and a home run in the first inning. Max ran like a tank, not fast but with a scary momentum and force, his entire body leaning forward and the muscles in his thighs quivering with power. After the first hour of play, he was drenched and his T-shirt was heavy with sweat. And though Max hit another homer with the bases full in the final inning, and jogged over each base with the confident swagger and ease of the victor, his team finally lost, overpowered by Jason Clark and a skinny, pale research scientist with long, braided hippie hair, who despite his sticklike frame matched Max in strength and competitiveness. As much as he wanted to win, Max didn't seem to mind losing, shook hands, and said, “Next year. There's always next year.”

Leah never would have guessed at this happy, vigorous, physical side of Max had she not seen it. And now that she had, now that she knew more about him, she was thrilled. He kept surprising her. She wished it wasn't true, but it evidently was: She loved him. She loved him despite—or even because of—something else she'd discovered during the game when she'd gone in to use the bathroom in Max's empty house. She couldn't resist searching his medicine cabinet and was saddened to see that her guess had been right. He did take Prozac. She'd been stupid to hurl her reckless guess at him a few weeks ago, to say something so intentionally hurtful. Nonetheless, after she'd made this discovery, she searched for more secrets. Having invaded several homes that summer, she knew right where to look,
right where people kept the things they wanted no one else to see. She could hear the distant noise of the game still in progress—the cheers and boos—as she sifted through Max's closet, looked through a few boxes and bags, and found nothing more than dozens of pairs of old sneakers of the sort he wore every day, photos of him and his ex-wife on various vacations, shoehorns, and bottles of athlete's-foot powder. Just before giving up and leaving his room, she bent down and saw the box under his bed, which was not, she was surprised to discover, a waterbed. He'd hardly hidden the stuff. He had no one to hide it from. The two magazines showed typical images—women with fake boobs engorging themselves on cocks, men with multiple women climbing over them and serving them in every conceivable manner. There was a bottle of lubricant called Sex Silk and a well-worn paperback entitled
Stories of Eden: Real Erotica Written by Women.
Leah was angry at first, jealous. She might have thought he was a creep had she not already known him and had she not seen that some married couples kept this sort of thing stashed away. And so her jealousy was tinged with curiosity and sympathy. He was needy, vulnerable. He wasn't just a scientist, a careful and brilliant man. He wanted what most men wanted. He wanted women and didn't have them. He wanted sex and didn't get it. He no doubt wanted companionship. And unlike the married couples who—or so Leah imagined—used this stuff together, Max had to look at it alone, locked in his house, and this sad thought made Leah want him more.

She stayed late that night, after everyone else had left, helping clear the plastic cups and empty bottles from the porch while Max scrubbed grill utensils and silverware in the sink, soapsuds sticking to his hairy forearms.
Kind of Blue
played on the stereo, a sliver of bright moon hovered in the corner of the kitchen window, and Leah hummed to the music as she wiped down the counters and put a few dishes away. As she worked she felt that she and Max made something like a family, something that felt comfortable and maybe even permanent.

Afterwards, they sat on the couch in the living room, where Max offered her a second beer—“As long as you think Franklin won't
mind”—and she took it, though she had no intention of drinking it. Max sat back into the puffy couch and smiled at her. “You've changed your look, haven't you?”

He'd now noticed her for the second time that day, and Leah felt things begin to shift between them, begin to feel different, slightly uncomfortable and tense in a good way. “A little,” she said.

“I noticed that Jason Clark has taken an interest. He tries hard whenever you're around.” Max was smiling. He thought it amusing, this romantic tension between two young people in his lab.

“I could care less about Jason Clark.”

“Poor Jason,” Max said, with far too much sympathy. Then, in the dim puddle of light cast by a dinky side-table lamp, Max reached over, leaning in close to Leah, so close that Leah almost lifted her face to his, almost presented herself to him, just when he clinked his beer with hers and ruined everything by sitting back into the couch and saying, “We're going to miss you. I have no idea how we're going to replace you at the lab. Thanks for your good work this summer.” And that was it: good-bye with a simple clink of beer bottles.

“I think Jason Clark is an asshole,” Leah said, unable to suppress the tremor of something like tears and rage that made Max sit up then. “And I like you. I still like you a lot.”

“I like you, too,” Max said.

“Don't say that.” She grabbed his arm, unsuspectingly draped across the couch, then his shoulder, gripping onto his cotton sweatshirt, and pulled him toward her with more force than she'd thought herself capable of. Their lips did not meet so much as collide, and when she kissed him she felt both teeth and mouth and smelled the surprising salty warmth of him.

“No, Leah.” He started to push her away, then recoiled when he realized that his hands were on her breasts. He relented then, and for a moment that Leah might have imagined, he started to kiss her, really kiss her, before he dug his fingers into her shoulders and threw her back against the couch.

“Stop that. Jesus.”

“Let's just kiss.”

“Leah,” he said, half shouting now. “I don't want to kiss you.” And then, obviously out of discomfort and completely without humor, he began to laugh and shake his head.

Why did he have to laugh? Any other response would have been better. “You
do
want to kiss,” Leah said. “I know all about what you want. I looked under your bed. I saw the stuff you have there, the stuff you get off to.”

“Leah,” he said.

“You're depressed, too. I looked in your medicine cabinet. I was right about you being depressed. You're perverted and depressed.”

“Jesus, kid,” he said. For a moment he put his head down, and Leah saw something in him she hadn't seen before. The loose neckline of his sweatshirt had been pulled down over his shoulder, where Leah's fingernails had left three red trails, and half his belly, soft and full, was showing. In this disheveled state, he was vulnerable, childish. Leah thought he might start crying. But he didn't. He was blushing. He was ashamed and humiliated. And as if just then realizing what Leah had seen, he straightened his sweatshirt and covered himself. “That's private, Leah. That is my …” He looked at her now and, in a voice neither loud nor angry, in a voice that left Leah feeling utterly irrelevant, he said, “Get out of my house now.” When she didn't move, he said in that same calm voice, “Now. I mean it.”

The next day, Leah knew she couldn't go in to work. Nor could she stay at home, lest Franklin and Noelle suspected that she'd once again done something wrong. So she left in the morning and loitered around town. She sat on the corner of State and North University where the dispossessed teenagers and homeless adults, most vaguely insane or very drunk, hung out, asking for money or playing old instruments, guitars or harmonicas, badly. A kid who wore a ripped T-shirt and something that looked like a dog collar kept asking her for a cigarette, and she kept saying she didn't smoke, until he started to freak her out and she left. She had a coffee at the Starbucks on Liberty Street, where she couldn't help overhearing a woman two tables away talking on her cell phone about the sex she'd been having with someone she'd just met. “It was a wonderful oral experience.” She
actually said that, whispered it, with Leah sitting right in front of her. To get through the afternoon, Leah perused the used bookstores on Liberty. She found herself picking up book after book, but not really looking at them, not even reading their titles. What was she doing? Why was she even in this place?

She had keys to eight homes in her pocket. But when she walked into the quiet, green neighborhoods and faced these houses, she couldn't enter them. Each confronted her with its vacancy, its quietness. When she stood in front of the Bradford house, where she was surprised to see a “Sale Pending” sticker over the sign, she wanted a child, a little girl to rush out the front door, leap onto the lawn, and begin jumping rope over the grass. A little girl to dispossess it of emptiness. And a man pulling weeds in the front yard, a dog in the backyard barking, a neighbor crossing the grass to get to the front door and knock on it. So she was all the more startled to see that someone was, in fact, home. Through the glare of sunlight on the kitchen window, Leah could see the arms and torso of a woman standing at the sink. Leah glanced behind her, saw that no one was looking, and approached. The woman wore a simple white blouse, and as Leah came closer she heard her humming a childish, frivolous song. She was happy, and this thought made Leah smile, made Leah step closer until she saw that the woman was Noelle. She was looking down, wiping the counter or maybe cleaning a dish, with a nonchalance, a girlish, simple pleasure in her face that Leah hadn't expected and that made her pause. She didn't know this woman, the one who stood at this sink and hummed this random song. She didn't know her at all, had never known her. Leah stepped forward, stepped directly in front of the window, not more than a few feet away. Had Noelle glanced up then, what would Leah have said? “Hi.” Or: “I saw you in the window. I was just passing by.” Or, for the umpteenth time, “I'm sorry for being a brat.” Or: “I was just thinking how beautiful and happy you look.” That last one—that's what she would have said, what her best self would have said. But without so much as glancing up, Noelle turned and walked out of the kitchen. It was a sudden turn, unexpected, just like another slap across the face.

* * *

On her way home that afternoon, Leah passed the police department. What she did next, she hadn't planned. It simply occurred to her when she saw three uniformed cops exit through a side door. She did not give herself time to reflect, to imagine what might happen, to foresee the consequences—a word Franklin might have used—of her actions. She simply did it. She walked in the door she'd seen the cops come out of and found her way to a thick glass window, obviously bulletproof, where an officer sat hunched over a microphone. He was reading something that was out of Leah's view. On the glass, just above eye level, a plastic sign read, “Pay fines here.” When he finally looked up, Leah had just begun to sense the words she would use. She spoke through a microphone on her side of the glass and could hear her voice amplified on his side. “To whom,” she said, “do I talk about having been raped?” The archaic construction of that sentence came right out of her Latin III class, in which, last semester, she'd received a B-, her lowest grade ever.

The cop didn't seem to understand. “Excuse me?” he said.

“I've been raped,” she said this time.

“I just do traffic tickets.” For a moment he looked helpless in the face of what Leah had just said. But then he was on the phone, and shortly after he hung up, a plainclothes officer, a young woman, appeared, escorted Leah down a brightly lit hallway and into an office that reminded her of the principal's office at her high school. An American flag stood in the corner and a few framed diplomas hung on the wall.

“You've been sexually assaulted?” the woman asked. Beneath a short haircut, her face was square and solid. And though her simple gray slacks made her appear mannish, her face expressed a great deal of sympathy when Leah nodded. “I'm sorry that happened to you. Are you hurt?” Leah couldn't remember the last time someone had asked her this question, and she liked hearing it now. “Do you need to see a doctor?”

“I don't think so,” Leah said.

The door opened then, and a balding man poked his head in. “You got a minute?” he asked, and the woman gave him a severe look that made her colleague immediately retreat, closing the door behind him.

“I'm seventeen,” Leah blurted out. This seemed necessary to say, though she hardly knew why and realized then that she was on the verge of panicking, that she was visibly trembling; her arms, her legs, her hands wouldn't stay still.

“It's all right,” the woman said. “You're all right now.” She offered Leah a cup of water, and Leah drank it down. “We should call your parents. I'm sure they'd like to know you're safe.”

Leah shook her head. “You can't call my mom. She's dead.”

It was a relief to have said this and a relief to see the woman nod. “Okay,” the cop said, expressing less sympathy than simple acknowledgment. It was, after all, simply so. It had happened. It was one more thing to know and not question. And this remedial gesture, this “Okay,” left Leah feeling calmer. “How about your father? Could we call him?”