Wide Eyed (10 page)
Authors: Trinie Dalton
“I am at your command,” I said. “But the wookiee must face away.” Then I gave him a kiss. He granted my wish and told Chewie to stay turned around with his eyes closed.
I lifted my shirt and Han looked for a second then reached out to feel them. He didn’t say anything, but he felt them with his fingers, a rub then a pinch. It hurt when he pinched but I didn’t say
Ouch!
I didn’t want him to think I couldn’t handle it. I remembered that part where Leia makes a movie of herself and plays it through R2-D2 saying,
Help me, Obi Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope.
She was so brave. Then, in the trash compactor scene, her braids fell out but she didn’t even care. Her hair was all messed up but she found a pole anyway and jammed up the walls that were about to mash everybody. I wondered,
What would Leia do?
I decided she would let Han squeeze her nipples as much as he wanted to. So he pinched mine pretty hard but it was kind of cool.
Then Chewie turned around and stared at me. I pulled my shirt down really fast. I was not Leia for a minute. I wanted to push him off the upper level into the sand. But I just stood strong and waited until Chewie climbed down the ladder, smiling the whole way like he was about to laugh. Han was about to laugh too, so I dumped him.
I crave something to pet. I mean something besides my dog or cat. I need something even softer. My cat has a velvety coat, but it’s not wispy and fine like a rabbit or rodent. Rubbing my nose in her soft, white belly fur makes me sneeze. Sometimes when I wake up, I’ll kiss my dog’s snout, but it unnerves me to think of the trash and hairy testicles it’s been rooting around in. Still, he gets a morning smell I like, and sometimes I get off on his musky, bushy mane.
Right before I got my learner’s permit, I took some allowance and bought a sheepskin steering wheel cover, anticipating the day when I could cruise the mountain highways in my own car, gripping the puffy wheel. It was expensive but high quality, not to mention so squishy that I figured if I ever went camping and forgot my pillow, it would come in handy.
In high school, I gave my friends rides in the sheepskin mobile, until one too many of them compared me to Ed Gein. After that, I began to view my flocculent treasure as a symbol of blatant disrespect for mammalian life. I was honestly worried someone would report me to PETA.
I stored my steering wheel cover with the car jack and canvas tool bag, only pulling it out when I was driving in neighborhoods where no one could recognize me. I dreamt of road trips to Montana, a place where I imagined every truck had something wrapped around its cold wheel. “Where’s yer steering wheel cover, girl?” some grizzly farmer would ask me. “It’s freezing ass, you’re gonna lose some fingers grabbing that bare wheel.” I’d reach down and pull out my sheepskin, proudly stretch it around the wheel, then grip. “That’s more like it,” the burly guy would say, satisfied.
Eventually the sheepskin pilled with little balls of wool. In the spots where I held it, the fur rubbed completely off and the skin grew torn and holey. Still, I used it until the thing was threadbare.
Back when I was in kindergarten, I used to have a lot of tea parties. Once when I opened my teapot to inhale the imaginary steaming hot peppermint tea, I got a whiff of my hamster with her pissy nestshavings stink. I decided she needed a bath. How cute she would look popping out of the teapot like a Victorian children’s book illustration—the china pot, the round brown hamster ears, its whiskers against a floral-print wallpaper (the decals on the kettle were roses). In my Beatrix Potter books there were no hamsters, but there were lots of mice, and they were always getting dirty then tidying up to stay out of trouble. I hallucinated Hunca Munca and Mrs. Tittlemouse getting snippy with my pet because she was so disheveled.
So in the upstairs bathroom I ran the tap water until it reached maximum hotness and filled my kettle. Then I submerged the hamster. She pressed her paws against the oblong rim and scratched at me with her sticky claws, so I took tissues and wrapped my fingers in them. Once I got her inside, she started moving in slow motion and panting. After a final squeaky noise, she died, then slunk down into the teapot, limp and slick.
I pet her dead wet body for a long time. My hamster’s fur was wet-soft instead of dry-soft, which is sort of like the difference between rubber and velcro. Although I knew I’d done something mischievous, my fascination overcame any feeling of regret. Part of my pleasure came from the fact that I could pet her for so long—finally she was docile.
Before I buried the teapot with her inside behind a tall fence overgrown with clematis in the backyard, I touched her one last time. The moment when I felt her cold tough skin, like leftover chicken nuggets, has stayed with me up to the present. Her fur felt nice, but I preferred her alive.
Fur still makes me sad but excited, or it did until last week when I visited a fur shop in Beverly Hills to check out the coats. This shop carries both exotic and classic coats like mink and fox. Whenever I’m there, I remember my grandma’s Silver Fox jacket that used to hang in her closet. I used to wonder why it almost never left the garment bag. Why didn’t she wear it all the time? I wanted a fur coat, but not one like hers. It had all these fox tails dangling from the waist. She looked like Davy Crockett when she wore it—like a pioneer trying to be dressy.
To enter Samantha Furs in Beverly Hills, you have to get buzzed in. I always put on lipstick before ringing the bell, so they’ll think I’m serious.
On my most recent trip, a lady greeted me with long fingernails painted a gruesome coffee brown—I mean, the caramel of diner brew, not a rich chocolate espresso hue.
“Can I help you?” she asked, following me around as I eyed the garments.
“Just looking,” I said. “Do you have any beavers?”
“We just got some beavers in,” she said happily. Her high heels clicked across the tile floor to an especially dark brown, floor length coat that was wired to the rack.
I looked at the price tag, $5,000. It probably took fifty beavers to piece that thing together. A hundred dollars per beaver.
Beavers are worth so much more than that,
I thought.
“It’s gorgeous,” I said. “Can I try it on?”
Later, as I left the shop, a coiffed lady walked by flaunting a white rabbit stole while carrying her Pomeranian in her arms. They were an advertisement:
Dead fur and live fur combine into my ultimate fur experience; don’t you wish you could afford the dead?
And I thought
, Why is dead animal fur more expensive than live animal fur? My dog was free! Fuck everyone in Beverly Hills, I’m going home to pet my dog for the next four hours.
Every time I leave the fur store with that familiar feeling of humiliation, I tell myself I’ll never go back.
I am officially still turned on by fur. I’m also in awe of living animals and wish to celebrate their lives to the fullest. Soft dead things attract and repel me—but I’ve only succumbed that once. Until I can live someplace wild where there are several velveteen animal species to experience, I’m cutting myself off. Lately I’ve learned to squeeze the fleshy cheeks of my pets the way I squeezed my old steering wheel cover. I shake them back and forth as I tell them how much I love them and how cute they looked when they were newborns. I dig up their baby pictures from some dusty box in the basement and bring the photos upstairs to wave in their blissful faces. My cat licks the photos (for the taste of the salty emulsion), and my dog just hangs his tongue out and slobbers on them. My pets were softer when they were young, but I still love them. Most people think Lenny (in
Of Mice and Men
) crushed his mouse accidentally because he was too strong and clumsy, but I believe he crushed it on purpose because he couldn’t stand how cute it was and he went crazy.
To be truthful, I can’t wait until my pooch is a foxy red panda-jacket. Sometimes I contemplate where in the house I will place his tanned skin—in the hallway, or maybe in the most classic spot, before the fireplace? I imagine lying on my side, nude, drinking champagne and having sex to Barry White on the earthly remnants of his being. I picture a remote mountain cabin, the savory smoke from the birchwood log that just got chucked into the fire, and the four-pointed Chow Chow hide pinned like butterfly wings to the top of the A-frame’s two-story tall wall across from the bunk beds. My husband hangs his raccoon-tail hat on the pegs while he takes his muddy boots off on the porch. I am wearing leather moccasins to keep my feet warm. My kitty sniffs under the stove for bacon drippings. And in this future of using my deceased animal friends as decorations and clothing, I feel closer to the animals, more a part of the kingdom than ever before. This skin trend can extend far beyond soft things, into smooth suedes, into cool hard leathers, then into other product realms such as antler chandeliers and carved-bone letter openers. But every creature will have died a natural death. The rich Pomeranian lady from Beverly Hills had it totally wrong.
A pair of salamanders circle a mushroom then lick it. Funny, since salamanders only eat nymphs, worms, grubs, and flies. I wasn’t expecting to see them at all on this frigid canyon hike. But there they are—brown, orange, and bumpy—nibbling at the soft brown gills lining the cap’s underside.
When I crouch, I notice they’re shivering. A frosty spray off the puddle to the left has built fuzzy ice beards on their chins. Frozen twigs and clovers look like miniature ice sculptures.
One salamander whips his tail up at the mushroom and snaps off a bite. It falls onto the ground where he can eat it gracefully. Still, he twitches and tries to claw the cold off himself, as if he’s hallucinating from advanced frostbite.
His companion is wounded, possibly from a recent owl attack. Maybe they ruffled the grass while crossing a meadow. An owl swooped down, extended its talon, but missed and slashed his head from ear to ear.
I scoop up one of the critters to pet its belly. They’re slow when cold, like tarantulas and snakes. Normally I like catching salamanders with my boyfriend Matt. He can make them magically appear. He’s a salamander magnet. “You found it,” he always says. But I know they smell his ankles and calves then paddle out of their wet caves toward his woody scent. He smells like forest. My own smell is no fun. It can’t compete with the mixture he exudes: pine and dirt, with a little something rotten mixed in.
One rock star who thought a lot about salamanders was the late Marc Bolan. He was the most fantastic singer. Back when he was Tyrannosaurus Rex, Marc Bolan wrote a song called “Salamanda Palaganda” about Aztec ancestors visiting him while he rested by a river. The chorus goes:
Salamanda palaganda, oh palomino blue
Salamanda palaganda, June’s buffalo too
Apparently salamanders in England are blue. Marc Bolan spent a lot of time singing and dreaming beside streams, so I deem him a reliable source of British river life information. You can tell by his songs that he was attentive to animals and universal truths. That’s part of what makes him so lovable.
Matt looks a lot like Bolan, but he’s more handsome. He also likes lying beside streams and visiting visionary relatives. His Cherokee great-greatgrandmother once came to him in the form of a tree. Her wrinkles were the tree’s bark. She sorted some things out for him then took off.
How cool to be related to trees,
he told me.
The salamanders in Southern California are brown-reddish-orange, the color of an overripe Bosc pear. Except for their bright-orange underbellies, they camouflage well in oak leaf compost and sycamore twigs. However, the first mature salamander I ever met was yellow, and his head was heart-shaped like a living Valentine.
I don’t know much about anything, except being lonely. When I’m alone, like now, I realize how much Matt and I have discussed the fact that being alone isn’t a bad thing. He says it’s good because you can experience supernatural things and more easily communicate with animals and plants. I’m sure he’s right. Once I saw a leaf on the end of a branch start glowing and make itself into an arrow. When I went the way it pointed, I found a nest of blue jays. Their antics entertained me all afternoon.
The salamanders who love my boyfriend’s smell are California Newts,
Taricha torosa.
They’re amphibians who lay eggs just below the surface of a stream. California Newts can afford to spend time out on the shady forest floor. I used to wonder why they go to the hassle of giving birth amid torrential currents. Then I found out their eggs need cold water to gestate.
Every time I question why animals act differently than we do, I feel so stupid and anthropocentric. Maybe the water is a lubricant. Picture it—eggs covered in a silvery mucous just sliding out your birth canal. The river would soothe your feverish, leathery skin. It would fill in the holes and distended tubes, dampen your itchy back bumps—not to mention quench your thirst. Still, in the next chaotic moment, when newborns swarmed around you, wouldn’t you be worried they’d be whisked away downstream? I mean, how would you secure your babies? After doing some research, I found out this tricky situation isn’t as tricky as you’d think, thanks to these special sticky egg sacs that bond everyone to rocks like the caulking in shower-tile cracks.