Large Animals in Everyday Life (16 page)

The guest speaker flies in on the last day of July, and you are there to meet him. You watch the speck of his plane approach from behind the terminal's glass wall, which boils against the palm of your hand as though an invisible fire rages just outside. The sun is so powerful you can see through your thumb, which looks old, though you are young. The jet taxis hugely in, sending its thrilling, screaming roar up through the carpet. When you're in your windowless office, only a few miles from here, typing memos for Dr. Mime, you never, ever think about this airport, the people strolling through it, the woods and swamps spread out around it, or the enormous blue sky. A massive wooden octagon a few feet from you houses four TVs, each facing in a different direction, each showing Oprah Winfrey, whose upbeat, reproachful gaze addresses those who have not taken sufficient charge of their lives. A woman in Oprah's audience yells, “Honey, if he did it to me, he's gonna do it to you!” You put your hand on
your shoulder bag, feeling the hard shape of the stolen tape recorder through the corduroy. Actually, it is not exactly stolen, but you cannot help but feel like a criminal. It is an old feeling, the feeling that you are trying to get away with something, something for which you will surely be forced to pay, eventually, though in this case you don't even have a plan, you're not even sure what you're trying to get away with.

The recorder is Dr. Mime's; he speaks into it as though he is a secret agent, holding his lips and teeth still so that you cannot make out certain words and have to type blank lines in their place, as he has instructed you to do in such an instance.
Cliff and Linda need to help me find my
———
that I misplaced the middle of last week
, you type. My garden? My bargain? My Darlene? It is impossible to tell.
To ask Williamson: Were we interested in whether anyone's been looking at the litigation papers that are filed with
———? He uses surveillance equipment on you as well: cameras in the corridors, a computer that keeps track of your phone calls, who knows what else? He sucks Tic-Tacs all day long, keeps cartons of them in your office's file cabinet—you can even hear them clicking against his teeth on the memo tapes—but he never offers a single Tic-Tac to you or anyone. And although he owns two or three Cessnas, his hobby, he never offers to take anyone for a ride, though he makes the mailroom guy hose down the planes on days like Veterans Day, when there is work but no mail. You yourself have tutored little dyslexic Barry Mime in fractions, though you are a part-time employee, no benefits, and Nancy, a customer service operator, always takes the Mime Mercedeses in for their emissions tests. And now it's your job to chauffeur the guest speaker, who will speak at an executive function to which you are not invited.

To all employees, night custodial staff NOT excluded
, you typed, earlier this week.
Topic: Suspicious individuals in your neighborhood making inquiries of you or your family regarding MimeCo or Dr. Mime. Last night a suspicious individual was making inquiries regarding me at the residences of my neighbors. This is possibly
related to the controversial nature of our upcoming visiting guest speaker. Naturally, I followed up as appropriate. If such an individual contacts you by telephone or in person, it would be helpful if you could tell them, “I don't have time to talk now, but please call me or return tomorrow at this same time.” Thank you for your assistance in this matter. This is the unfortunate side of business and we are going to pursue it in a
———
fashion
. Richard fashion? Bitchier fashion? Denatured fashion?
Mature
, that was it, you typed it in—and then, without even thinking about it, you switched off the recorder and dropped it into your bag, which sat slumped between your ankles on the floor. When Linda came to the doorway of your office a minute later, your stomach turned over.

“You are
red
,” she said. Linda sells Mary Kay and always comments on your appearance, pushing you to let her give you a makeover, but even thinking about confronting your face matter-of-factly like that causes you shame. You purse your lips and duck your head whenever you have to look into a mirror, hanging on to certain illusions. You cry at night, sometimes, like anyone:
Oh God, oh God, I'm so lonely, I'm so lonely
.

“Coffee makes me flush,” you told her.

She gave you a look that said, “You are crazy.” Sometimes she just says it aloud to you, so you know the look. “Well, hand it over,” she said then.

You just looked at her.

“Your
time card
,” she said. “Girl, wake up! It's Friday!”

After she walked away you felt the sharp edge of the recorder with your instep, and then you cut it out of your thoughts altogether, as though Mime's clocks and cameras and computers might pick up its presence there.

Driving home you had an itchy scalp, a sign of guilt, your mother would have said, and in fact you also had the sinking sense of inevitable wrongness that you'd always felt around your mother. When you were a child your toys would disappear if you left them lying around on cleaning day; if you asked when you would get them back, she would say, “When I feel like it.”
Sometimes when she was out you would visit your Dawn doll in her bottom dresser drawer, but there would have been no pleasure in taking it out and playing with it. And there was a moment that came right after the first chorus of “Killing Me Softly,” a record you'd won at a birthday party, that made your heart jump for years whenever you heard it, ever since the day your mother shouted your name at that moment in the song because she'd just discovered something else you'd done wrong, something you'd thought you'd gotten away with but which she had just then discovered.

But your mother was, or claimed to be, an unhappy woman, and when you complained as a teenager about how cold she had been, how cruel, she argued that it was only because she felt things so much more deeply than others. “Every morning I used to zip you into your parka and kiss you goodbye,” she said, “but then one day when you were in second grade you pushed me away and told me not to kiss you, and I felt so hurt, so rejected, that I never tried to kiss you again—what else could I have done?” No warmth blossomed between the two of you after that explanation, but at least she had offered one. Mime does not seem to feel that he needs any, and perhaps he doesn't, being only a boss and not a mother.

The guest speaker pushes through the turnstile. In person he barely resembles his book jacket photo; he does not appear to be brooding or contemplating danger and loss. His head seems smaller. He wears dark woolen clothes, inappropriate in the heat, and his hand is delicate, scrubbed and vulnerable-looking on the strap of his carry-on bag. You step forward to introduce yourself and, without planning it or even knowing you're going to do it, you use a fake name. “I'm Alex Trotter,” you say. Alex Trotter is a boy you slept with a few times in college, just after your mother's death—he is, actually, the last boy you slept with. That was two years ago, and his name bursts out of your mouth as though of its own volition, as though it has waited long enough.

The guest speaker smiles photogenically and says, “Alex,” and you feel a little dizzied. A memory shoots back to you: when you were seven or eight, just after your father left you and your mother for his girlfriend in Norway, your mother explained to you that in real life princesses did not wear fancy gowns, were not necessarily pretty (Look at Margaret and Anne, she said, who were
homely
)—princesses looked, she said, like anyone, like everyone. The next morning, without planning it, you told the other children on the bus to school that you were a princess, explaining in the commanding, reasonable tones of your mother that there was no way of knowing a princess by her appearance alone. It was not exactly a lie; if there was no way of knowing, weren't you as much a princess as a princess nobody knew was one? And though you remember almost nothing firsthand about your father—just the outlines of his kind blond face, his low voice singing “Mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy,” him pressing his handkerchief to your face, saying, “You have a booby in your nose”—you remember the moment after your princess lie as perfectly as though it happened yesterday: you gazed out the smudgy bus window, changed and desperate and ordinary all at once.

“I'm all yours, Alex,” the guest speaker says. His smallness suddenly seems calculated, fierce, like that of a ferret. He writes about outrages in other countries, chemical leaks and medical scams and robber barons—“America's angriest writer,” a blurb on one of his book jackets says. His wife has the name of some foreign, toxic flower; you read it in the dedication of his first book and thought,
Of course, how perfect
.

In the front seat of your mother's old Fury the guest speaker asks polite questions about the town. You answer a few truth-fully—“I can drive from one end to the other in eighteen minutes,” you tell him—but then you begin to make things up or steal information from the lives of your friends, who are mostly secretaries or assistants like yourself. You invent and describe ordinary pets and relatives, small adventures and ambitions and
defeats. You have two hamsters, Hanky and Panky, you say, and one time you found Siamese twin baby turtles in your backyard; they could only walk in a circle and you named them Yin and Yang. You tell him your mother is still alive, is in fact the most popular dentist in the county, the only female dentist, too, and you mention that you heard that in Japan it only costs fourteen dollars to get a root canal. While you talk, you notice in the rearview that the couple in the car behind yours is having an animated conversation in sign language, and for a moment it seems that you too are making shapes in the air with your words, producing and erasing commonplace things like a magician manipulating scarves and coins and wristwatches. The silver windows of the Hilton flash just off the highway, but you whiz past. “Room's not ready yet,” you lie.

“That's all right,” the guest speaker says. “I'm on vacation. Why don't you be my guide, show me what you do for fun?”

You smile in a measured way so that he not recognize how easily charmed you are. For fun you order Szechuan beef sometimes. You have accepted without complaint or question, though you hadn't realized you accepted it until this moment, the absence of men attempting to charm you. But
why
? you wonder now. You feel anxious, like a guest arriving at a fabulous party several hours late—what will be left for you? “There's a bar I once went to over on the Panhandle,” you tell him. This happens to be the truth. It is the only excursion out of town you have taken since your mother died—you met with your mother's lawyer, signed papers, turned down his offer of dinner, and drank one gin and tonic alone at this bar. “They were so drunk and Southern there I could barely understand a word they said,” you say. “This man with a sunken-in face came up to me and said something that sounded like ‘Flip knot' over and over. Then he went back to his stool and said, ‘If you see something you want, go for it,' until the barmaid yelled at him and kicked him out the door.”

“Perfect,” the guest speaker says. “Love it.”

A moment later, he says, “So what do you think of human blood and suffering? Ever seen any?”

“What?” you say.

“Do you ever feel removed from it?” he says. “You know, being alive and all?”

You glance at him, but he looks like anyone, like everyone—there is no way of knowing a madman by his appearance alone. In his last book, titled
Uh-Oh
, he wrote about some children in Brazil who found glowing radioactive powder in a public dump and smeared it all over their faces, playing clowns and phantoms. How angry is he, exactly? you wonder. You think of the suspicious individuals making inquiries, you picture the guest speaker's graceful angry hands around your throat. Traffic veers off an exit behind you as you speed recklessly ahead; the deaf couple—if they even
were
deaf—have vanished. Humdrum moments from your recent life crowd you, demanding payback.
My God
, you think,
if I live through this, I must get busy
.

But then he is unwrapping a stick of gum for you and apologizing. “I'm uncouth,” he is saying. He is charming again. You take the gum, and a deep breath. “I am highly visible,” he says. “I have a wife, children. But that's all on the outside, you know what I mean?”

He is speaking again in sensible cliché, and you nod with relief, feeling your hair swing, the pretty hair of Alex Trotter. The real Alex was not kind. He asked, a day or two after your mother died, what you planned to do with your life, and when you told him that you had no idea, he said, “Well, get cracking.” His tone of voice reminded you of the way your mother would stand on the porch, holding open the screen door, waiting for the cat to decide whether or not it wanted to go out, saying, “Would you make up your alleged mind?”

“I'm forty,” the guest speaker says, “and I've been all over the world, but I've never been in the hospital, never been to a funeral. Have you been to a funeral?”

“Yes,” you say, “but it didn't seem real. It didn't make anything seem any more real. Isn't that what funerals are supposed to do?” You borrowed eyeliner from one of your mother's friends in the funeral home's rest room after the burial. Two chigger bites on your ankle itched furiously all through the service. The next day you bought a can of apple juice from the machine in your dormitory's lobby, a can that had probably been placed in the machine before your mother's death. Everything seemed impartial, improbable. “There was no human blood,” you tell the guest speaker.

He laughs. “You seem like a tough girl, Alex,” he says. “Do you want to wallow with me?”