The Animal Girl (7 page)

Mr. Morris was a large man, tall and thick and bearded, not in the least known for his gentleness. He stood with his clipboard in one hand, a ballpoint pen resting behind his ear, his BF Goodrich name-badge rising and falling with each breath. When he crossed the street, Mr. Brown and Mr. Scott both backed away, seeming to give him space to comprehend the tragedy that had killed his mother. The rescue squad had mostly zipped old Mrs. Morris up in a brown plastic bag, but Mr. Morris could still see the worst of her. A great weight seemed to force him to his knees. The whisper of a policeman in his ear made him weep. The sprinkler in the middle of the lawn came on then so that a hard rope of water slapped Mr. Morris in the side, his shirtsleeve and pant leg suddenly dripping. An adult seized five-year-old Marty Green and turned off the faucet the child had been fiddling with. “Get away!” Mr. Morris yelled, and his friends and neighbors retreated. “Get the hell fuck away!” People returned to their houses then while we withdrew behind the bush that Gary Watkins had hurled
on earlier. From there, we watched the kneeling Mr. Morris, his whole body dripping, his whole body seeming to grieve, as he noticed his daughter locked away in her odd, unchanged world.

His real anger began then. He pushed his way through two police officers, beat the hood of the car with his fist, and became more enraged when his daughter didn't so much as flinch. He cursed her, demanded that she turn that music off and step out of that car or he'd kick her ass to he didn't know goddamn where, though all he did was smash a dent into her locked door with his foot, turn around, hold his face in his hands, then kick the car again while Holly's seated dance became more animated, her forearms raised and swinging double time and opposite the back-and-forth sway of her head, graceful, skillful in a way that my friends and I had never come close to on the dance floor. She moved in perfect sync to what Mr. Morris and all our parents felt was the frivolous, sexual beat of godless music, the sort of music his daughter locked herself into her room for hours to listen to. It wasn't Christian, Mr. Morris knew. It wasn't good, and so perhaps it was easier to hate his daughter for loving filth like that than to feel whatever he'd been feeling for his dead mother. He hadn't gotten along with Holly, as the whole neighborhood knew, for the better part of a year, and his growing fatherly rage came out now as he continued to beat the hood and to curse Holly, no longer his little girl, not after she'd repeatedly sneaked out of his house at night, not after he'd caught her and an older boy he'd never met sharing a cherry Slurpee spiked with vodka at the Wilford Mall. He suspected she'd done other things, too, and so he hated her that afternoon, the dirty, rebellious girl whom his mother had always been so willing to drive around town—to the mall, where he'd caught her with that boy, to the movies, where she'd done God knew what, to soccer practice, to anywhere she'd wanted to go—which might have been the thought that made him shout, “You killed her!” And maybe it was those words that made him stop and put his head down on the hood of the car. His wife, who had been approaching the scene hurriedly from a block away—she'd been having coffee with Mrs. Eliot, the neighborhood piano teacher, and had arrived just in time to hear her husband call their daughter a killer—slowed down to learn from a
nearby policeman what had happened. She cupped a hand over her mouth. She shook her head. She went to her husband and held him then. “I'm sorry,” he said.

“Your father says he's sorry,” Mrs. Morris shouted at the car window so that Holly could hear her through the music.

“She won't come out of there,” Mr. Morris told his wife.

“Please come out now, Holly!” Mrs. Morris shouted.

“Come out now, Holly,” her father said.

“Sweetheart,” Mrs. Morris said. But Holly was gone, far away from them, and finally they had to leave her there and hold each other while the same policewoman who'd failed to lure his daughter out of her trance—or whatever she was in—asked Mr. Morris questions and had him sign papers that made him cry still more loudly. We'd come out from behind the vomity bush since nobody seemed to notice us anymore. All the same, we shouldn't have been watching. This was private and shameful, we knew. But we couldn't not watch. Others had gone in and Mrs. Allison came out on her porch to tell us that this “happening” wasn't for us boys to see. We told her that we were just skating, which was sort of true. Mark Watkins was riding the nose of his board with skill and easy cockiness until his brother knocked him off and said, “Not here, dumb ass. Not now.”

“She's fucking crazy,” Jack Rogers said.

“Shut up,” I said, thinking about the 200-plus points I'd scored on Holly's ass and feeling both famous and ashamed about it. I would have fought for her then. I would have smashed Jack Rogers's face into the ground and stood on his head to keep him from saying anything more about her. I wasn't at all sure what I was protecting her from, and later, after what would happen between Holly and me at her grandmother's funeral, I'd see that I really didn't want anything to do with her. But Jack Rogers backed off, and nothing happened.

The fire truck had gone, as had the ambulance with the Morris grandmother. The counselor, a woman wearing a dress suit, had arrived to convince Holly to leave the car, though finally she retreated inside with the Morris parents. One of the more beautiful sunsets we ever remembered seeing—then or years later—was beginning to light the sky a deep purple that made our shadows into twenty-foot
lanky giants, their shapes falling across yards and out into the street. Just as we were about to leave and go home to our separate dinner tables, we saw an amazing thing. The music inside the Buick turned off, and Holly Morris stepped out—the long, spooky, dark lines of her shadow unfolding and preceding her across the grass—and went into her house. The amazing thing was how she walked on air all the way to the front door, taking these light, easy steps so that you could hear the crisp, brief click of her soccer cleats, heel to toe, against the concrete. Jack Rogers, who still talks about that day more than a decade later, never mind that Holly Morris long since left town and never came back, claims now that he saw her take a gleeful skip between steps. A quick, happy little kick. But he overdoes it every time he tells that story. She was just walking as if something nice and sweet as hell had happened to her and now she felt better and more beautiful than she usually did.

It didn't take long for Holly Morris to get out of the room where her mother had locked her away. She must have climbed out the window and had a rough landing since she walked back into her grandmother's funeral through the front door with a nylon ripped all the way down one leg, a smudge of garden dirt on her cheek, and an excited, invigorated look on her face, the sort of look you get when you're free again. I tried not to notice her. I was in line then to view the old woman. This would be the closest I'd ever come to a dead person, and I was watching the adults ahead of me—the way Mr. Almer bowed his head and said a few silent words—so that I'd know what to do when I got to her. I'd watched the Morris men—who'd viewed her first and for a long time—touch her, lift her hands, lace their fingers—or try to—in her too-stiff ones, lean into the casket and kiss her, nudge their cheeks against hers in a display of physical affection for the dead that scared me and made me nervous about my own turn with her. But when Mr. Almer backed away, I found that I knew exactly what to do, how slowly, quietly to approach, bow my head, look and feel solemn, say a few silent words to myself. This was how to grieve and help my neighbors grieve their loss. I felt the pressure of a hand on my shoulder and looked over at Mr. Green, a
good friend of my father, who said, “Hi, son” in a dusky half-whisper before he looked down, shook his head, and said, “Oh, Christine,” which had been the old woman's name, then left me there alone with her. I knew next to nothing about Holly's Grandma Morris save what Pastor Lamb had already said about her feeding cats and driving neighborhood kids around, about her love of gardening. And because Pastor Lamb had asked everyone present that day to contemplate one thing they knew that made Christine Morris unique and human, I treasured what seemed to me the saddest thing about her by saying to myself, “She had a passion for stray things.” A real reverberation of sadness moved through me, and I stood there for a moment until I heard the slight thud of something against the foot of the coffin and turned to see Holly, the streak of garden dirt still on her cheek, smiling at me and holding a bowl of green olives she'd brought from the kitchen, where dozens of casseroles and other food neighbors had delivered crowded the counters. She selected an olive, aimed, then launched it. It hit my chest and rolled over the shaggy carpet. She smiled at me very nicely again, her eyes saying something like, “Hi, you.” Then she turned and flashed the same look at Jack Rogers and the Watkins brothers before throwing a cluster of olives at them, forcing them to retreat down the hall and out of range. Holly saw that, with the dead woman behind me, I had nowhere to go. Standing in a sassy, smart-ass way, all her weight on one hip, she tossed another olive at me, this one flying over my shoulder. Mrs. Morris blasted down on Holly then, using too much force right there in the middle of the room and in the presence of that beautiful and expensive coffin. As if wielding a hammer, she swung the flat of her hand down on Holly, who willingly bent low and gave Mrs. Morris an easy target, even hiking her lemon skirt over her hips so that we could see—Jack Rogers and the Watkins brothers staring from their safe place down the hall—through the white haze of her nylons the tight turquoise panties covering what to us had been her ten-point ass. Mrs. Morris was winded and had to stop, and only then realized what her daughter had done, what had happened to that room: Many mourners had looked away from the old woman, surrounded by banks and reefs of flowers, and fixed their eyes instead on what
her daughter was displaying. It was full and perfectly shaped with a red blotch of torn skin just above her thigh where her nylon had ripped. Mr. Brown, Mr. Almer, Mr. Green (who had just touched my arm), Mr. Watkins, my father, Mr. Lemon, and other men—and some women, too—were looking and kept on looking until they realized what they were doing and realized that Mrs. Morris, still breathing hard from the exertion, saw them doing it, which was when the entire room looked away. I averted my eyes, too, for a long time, putting my head down and feeling the rush of blood and shame to my face. When I looked up again, my neighbors were shaking their heads and whispering. Some wept quietly. Others stood in line to view the old woman a second time. Mrs. Morris was now the only person looking at Holly, who had stood up and was smoothing the front of her skirt. Her mother stared at her with quiet disgust until her husband, his usual bad temper subdued by exhaustion and grief, took his wife's hand and led her into the kitchen, where they would no longer have to watch their daughter misbehave.

Now that Holly was free to do as she liked, she tossed a final handful of olives at a circle of women standing in an opposite corner, many of whom moved uncomfortably, shifting, trying not to look at the girl. Mrs. Mathers wiped her left cheek with a napkin where one had hit. But no one turned. No one acknowledged the girl. All at once, Holly gave up, put the bowl down, and looked around for someone or something. She looked from one corner to another until her eyes found me. She smiled and blew a kiss off her fingers in my direction. I wanted to turn and join the line in front of the coffin again. I wanted to join Jack Rogers and the Watkins brothers. But they had left the room, gone down the hall or out the door, and Holly was already in front of me, had already taken my hand. She pulled me out the front door and around the side of the house, hungry, dirty cats following us the whole way. “We'll use Grandma's gardening shed,” she said.

“I should go inside,” I said. But when I planted my feet, she yanked me forward with both hands. A group of men on the back porch smoking didn't seem to notice us. Starving stray cats mewed loudly, aggressively, at our feet. Holly kissed the side of my neck lightly
and squeezed my hand so tightly that the bones hurt. Cats brushed against my legs. “They get bitchy when Grandma doesn't feed them.” She kicked one out of our way, opened the door, and pushed us into a darkness so thick I flinched, moved my other arm out in front for protection, and found only cold air.

“I need to go back,” I said. Her hand on my face pushed me against a wall. The shed smelled of earth and dampness and old metal tools. With a kick of her leg, the shed door slammed shut and the small triangle of light became a chink. “Please,” I said.

“Coward,” she said. I couldn't see her, though her hand darted from my neck to my crotch, where she pulled up sharply until it hurt. “You little ass-kissing …” She let go of me, then dug her hand into my butt and pushed me against her. “Ten points, Billy,” she said. She wedged her knee forcefully between my legs. “Kiss me now.” And even as her tongue entered my mouth and our teeth clattered and her hands tightened on my face, clawing at the bones, I wanted to be inside standing above the dead woman, anticipating the proper thoughts and feelings, and then, looking down at her white, reconstructed face, thinking and feeling them.

The summer job Leah was interviewing for at the university biomedical laboratory did not exactly require her to kill anything, but it did involve the deaths of animals, several of them every week. Franklin, Leah's father, who had been a research doctor and was now an administrator at the University of Michigan Medical School, had gotten her the interview. It was part of his recent campaign to jolt her out of her slump, to revive, educate, and edify Leah, who at seventeen was friendless, had no direction, no interests, was homebound out of choice and very much in the way of her father and his new girlfriend, Noelle.