When We Were Animals (20 page)

The red light turned to green, and the car glided forward again. We were just around the corner from my house.

“Do you think…” Miss Simons began. But she didn’t seem to know how to phrase the next part.

I wanted to put her out of her misery. It made me anxious to see adults flounder like that.

“The thing is,” I said, “he’s still in love with my mother. I’ve told him he should try to move on, but he just thinks about her all the time.”

“No one could ever replace your mother, and that’s not what I’m trying to do here.”

“I know.”

Now I was beginning to be confused by the conversation. But we were pulling up in front of my house, and it seemed important to finish things.

“Anyway,” I said. “You’re very nice, but I don’t think he’d be interested in dating right now.”

She looked at me, and she seemed confused. Then something occurred to her.

“Oh,” she said. “I’m afraid I’ve messed this all up. I just wanted to do right by you.”

Just then the door of the house opened, and my father emerged. It was a strange thing, because he was not usually home at this time of the afternoon. Also, he did not seem surprised to see me sitting in my physics teacher’s car, nor did he come down the path to meet me.

“I asked him,” Miss Simons said, “your father. I asked him if I could be the one to talk to you about it.”

I felt sick to my stomach in the way that you sometimes do at those moments when you realize the world has been playing tricks on you.

Miss Simons had not been asking my permission to see my father—she was telling me that they had already been seeing each other behind my back. She was not the petitioner but the executioner.

I opened the car door and pushed myself up and out.

As I passed him on the way into the house, my father called after me in a voice that expected no response:

“Lumen. Lumen.”

I walked out of his voice. That’s what it felt like. I opened the door in the room of my father’s voice, stepped outside, and shut the door behind me.

They had been
seeing each other since the fall—but I was only told about it after the fact, perhaps as a punishment for my having succumbed to the corruptions of adulthood. Everyone was dirty now. We might as well bare it all. It soon became a habit for Margot Simons to spend evenings with my father and me at our house.

She was maybe ten years younger than my father and very pretty in an angular way. Her lipstick always looked like it had been recently applied, and her brunette hair was trimmed perfectly along her jawline. Her purse rattled with tubes of mascara and clamshells of powder and tortoiseshell combs and an assortment of clips and fasteners to hold her comeliness in place. She wore jeans when she came to our house, and the first thing she did when she arrived was take off her shoes to expose whatever playful color her toenails were painted that day. Her feet were bony, and she folded them up under her when she joined my father and me on the couch for our regular Saturday evening viewings of black-and-white movies.

She would yawn and rest her head on my father’s shoulder, and I hated her.

Her attempts at befriending me did not help. She promised she would take me shopping at the mall the next county over. When she said it, my father chuckled uncomfortably and shook his head. He knew I was not a typical teenage girl, one who gets giddy about shopping for dresses at the mall. I glared at him.

One night, after she had left, I confronted him in the kitchen.

“Do you love her?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I think I could.”

“Will you marry her?”

“Lumen.” He leaned forward and touched my hair with his hand, as though trying to incant some long-lost version of himself and me. “I used to hold you on a pillow in my lap. Look at you now.”

But when I gave him nothing but a cold look in return, he drew back his hand as though it had been bitten. He looked poisoned, miserable.

“Look,” he said, and now there was nothing delicate about his voice. He had rarely in his life used this tone with me, and it had always made me feel criminal. He was explaining something, for better or worse, and whether I liked it or not was beside the point. I shrank back. “I didn’t tell you before because I didn’t want to hurt you. No one can replace your mother.”

“No one’s talking about her. Who brought her up?” I was irritated at the way everyone was forecasting the damage I would suffer as a result of my loyalty to my mother. I didn’t like being second-guessed.

“I’m just saying I was being careful. But now, now that you’re…growing up…”

And that was it. It was his euphemism for breaching. We are always told that honesty and truth are the shining ideals. But sometimes the truth could be used as a punishment. That’s what I learned on that day.

“Go away,” I told him.

I wanted to hurt them. I wanted to hurt them all. My father and Margot Simons. Blackhat Roy and Rose Lincoln. Boring, bland Polly. Peter Meechum, who seemed ennobled by hurt. Even my mother, who left me early on rather than staying by my father’s side and being the one single love of his life—even my mother, the imaginary doll whose enfabulation seemed to grow more and more childish with each passing day. I wanted to hurt her, too, for not being real.

The kind of
geologist my father was was an engineering geologist—which meant that he studied how characteristics of the natural landscape might affect the man-made structures that are built on top of it. He was a person who knew how to harmonize man and nature. He created elaborate three-dimensional simulations on his computer that spun freely in space. When I was a young girl, I admired them, wishing to be able to create such pretty artifacts of my own. He also had a whole set of magnifying lenses that I liked to observe the world through.

Now, though, I tried not to go into my father’s office at all. A border, a line had been drawn between us. Also, I didn’t like to catch sight of the map I had made him, framed and hanging on the wall. All his creations were so pure and crystalline. Everything I made was corrupt.

I was different now. And he was different, too, though he put on a show that suggested otherwise.

We were all going on with our lives as though the world had not been burned to the ground, as though we had not all become grotesques in a pathetic and disgusting circus. Everybody pretended that everything was just as it had been before.

But I, for one, was made sick by reminders of what the world used to be.

I cleared my room of all its stuffed animals. I boxed them up and put them in the very back of my closet. Harmless animals with big baby eyes and soft, cuddly fur. It seemed like a cruel joke that I was only now beginning to understand.

I sat in the middle of my empty bed then, my knees to my chest and my chin pressed into my knees, and I tried to think of my home as one of my father’s computer models—all straight lines and pure white planes. So clean, and everything calculated, accounted for. I could spin it in my mind, floating and free, with nobody but me inside.

Sometimes you were
impatient for the full moon. Because you were just looking for a reason to run.

I was growing sour to the appurtenances of civilization—the clerks at the stores, the way they smiled politely and bestowed pleasantries on you. The progressive roar of lawn mowers, the tittering of sprinklers.

I went to the mine. It was between moons.

I went to my holy place, the cistern, and I prayed my prayers down into the pit. There were two songs that my father used to sing to me when I was a little girl, and I sang them both down into the void. They echoed and disappeared.

Nothing was the same as it had been.

One day you were one thing, and the next day you were another.

Even now.

I bake snickerdoodles for the meeting of the community league at Marcie Klapper-Witt’s house. I pile them high on a cut-crystal platter. Marcie puts them on a long table with other snacks brought by other upstanding members of the community. Fancy, Marcie’s daughter, walks up and down the side of the table, sampling the food. She borrows a brownie, takes one bite, and puts the remainder back on the tray. Same thing with the thumbprint cookies, then the cucumber sandwiches. No one watches her.

There is a planter in the shape of a dachshund, and while the girl stands on tiptoes to reach a platter of truffles on the back of the table I take the planter and place it on the ground just to her right. When she moves to continue down the length of the table, Fancy Klapper-Witt stumbles over the dachshund and falls, the tiara tumbling from her head. She begins to cry, sitting there like a pale pork, her hands raised in supplication.

Her mother rushes over, grabs the girl up in her arms, asks her why she moved the doggie planter.

And me? I retrieve the tiara from the floor and deliver it back onto the feathery blond head of the little girl.

Her mother smiles at me gratefully.

My husband, Jack, does not attend these meetings—but I am surprised to see there a woman I recognize. It’s Jack’s colleague from school—the one who sits on his desk. Her name is Helena, I learn, and she teaches art. Her hands are speckled with dried paint, her fingernails short and scuffed. I don’t speak with her, but I put myself in position to overhear her conversations. She has a very melodious voice, and she is absolutely positive about the world. She just recently moved into the neighborhood from California, of all places. She misses the weather there, but she finds the people here delightful.

I follow her from room to room, remaining unobserved. Helena is attentive and careful, much like me. Once, she goes into the kitchen, and I peek at her from around the corner. I see her rinse her glass in the sink—and then, thinking she’s alone, she picks something from between her teeth with her fingernail and flicks it into the sink.

I like a woman who pays attention to her teeth.

When the meeting itself gets under way, we all sit around in a big circle in the living room. I stay toward the back, leaning on a windowsill, directly to the right of Helena. She has marvelous ideas about the restoration of the local park. When she is lost in thought, I notice, her lips part slightly and she breathes out of her mouth.

Only once do our eyes meet, and she gives me a small, indistinct smile, as though we were casual compatriots. I wonder if we are.

It was the
middle of March, between moons, and our town had its first spell of spring. Afternoons, I would open the window of my bedroom and let the breeze curl the pages of my homework as I finished it. Then, thinking to avoid my father and Margot Simons, I returned to the mapping of the mines. There were too many people aboveground, too many rivalries, too many betrayals, too many suffocating passions—so I went below and found absolution in the pitch black of those lonely passages.

Underground, the air was tight, and the empty spaces felt like a persistent ache—those crumbled walls, those low overhanging beams that were so soft they sometimes turned to wood dust in your grip. I did not mind stumbling upon dead ends, because it meant I could call an end to whatever tunnel it was on my map. I marked cul-de-sacs with special skull symbols. Pretty soon my map was filled with skulls. You could travel in many directions, but there was only one destination.

That was why, one night, I went deeper into the tunnels than I ever had before. I was reckless with voids made out of possibilities.

Getting lost was not a problem anymore. I’d developed a distinct understanding of the dark, a natural sense of how the tunnels were built and which direction they were going. I could feel, in my bones, the elevation of the earth. I could sniff my way north, south, east, and west. I knew the way the breezes blew through those ancient causeways.

But a human body was something I never imagined stumbling upon. Perhaps I was foolish. I don’t know.

Still, in the middle of a running life, you sometimes discover death sitting peacefully, just around corners. Waiting for you.

It was the body of a girl.

Where I found her was a dead end, but this was unlike the other dead ends I had found. It wasn’t a collapse, it was simply a terminus. The tunnel widened slightly, like a little bulb-shaped room, and then it just abrupted—a round stone room.

I could tell it was a blind tunnel because I knew that the dust hung heavier in the air in caverns that had no outlet. I could feel the end of things in my lungs. I had stopped, leaning one hand against the cold stone and bending double to cough the dust out of me. That’s when the dim glow of my penlight fell on her.

Her hair was like wheat. Like dried hay in a barn. Her hair was like that. Like an empty barn on a day when you walk alone down the hill to discover the world for yourself.

Her hair was like hay, and her skin was brittle and dry, like papier-mâché. Her skin was gray—and it was stretched and dried up and petrified by age. It did not give under my touch. When I put my cheek to her cheek, it felt like nothing human. It was the cheek of an old doll. Her skin, her hair—they were kindling for a fire that would burn down the world.

The eyes were closed, the lids glued together by time. The lids were flat and sunken because, no doubt, the eyeballs underneath were shriveled grapes. They did not stare. There was no staring.

Her mouth was the worst thing. And it did not speak.

The skin of her face had dried and shrunk over the bone. Her lips pulled back, exposing two rows of white teeth. Her teeth were dusty. With my finger, I polished them, and they were perfect underneath the dust—rows of pearls. But they looked too big, her grin too wide. And no grin at all, not really. The dead don’t laugh. Their mouths are not expressive, they are just hungry. Her jaw hung open, her gaping maw stretched wide, as though she would swallow you. It looked as though she might be calling to me, as though she had something to say. But there was nothing. There were no words. She was dumb as bones.