Large Animals in Everyday Life (19 page)

My mother and father glance up at me, amused and expectant, as I step into the hallway, into their view. I hold the door closed behind me so the horse won't get out.
You survived the disaster area
, my mother says dryly.

I'm just going to get some carrots
, I say.
If that's okay. We have carrots, right
?

It'll take a lot more than carrots
, my father says, and he and my mother both laugh, pleased with themselves.

There were actual fires burning
, I tell them. I am nervous, afraid to let the conversation falter.

They look at each other, my father shaking his head.
How many times have we told her not to smoke in there
? he says.

She knows
, my mother says.
She knows and she pays no attention, she's off in her own little dream world
. They look back at me as though expecting my contribution, my affirmation. This is crazy, I think. Have you forgotten already, forgotten that for so long, so many years, it was I who was the problem? They gaze at me with ironic half-smiles, not seeming to remember.

Well, I guess I'll go get some carrots
, I say.

I open the door a crack and look back into my sister's room once more before going downstairs. The horse hears me but doesn't turn his head; he trots unhurriedly over to the window and stands there looking out at the yard, the sky. His eyes are dark, his expression calm and blank. My chest aches suddenly, terribly—
he is lonely
!
Of course
, I think,
horses are herd animals
. He stands breathing blankly, neither impatient nor patient, the object of his waiting murky, inarticulate, diffuse within his solid self. He does not yet know what it is he wants. But it is so clear to me, I can hardly stand it, my heart rushes all around—there
must be something I can do! He is a herd animal! He stands there, the light in his face, watching, waiting …

• • •

But there was nothing I could do, I had to go ahead and shut the door. I could not then and cannot now do anything to make the situation right.

I said: Oh, for God's sake, I'm not some pervert—you think I'm like that hockey puck in New Jersey, the mascot who got arrested for grabbing girl's breasts with his big leather mitt at home games? I'm a polar bear! I molest no one, I give out ice cream cones in the freezer aisle, I make six dollars an hour, I majored in Humanities, I'm a
girl
.

I was talking to the Winn-Dixie manager in his office. Like every grocery-store manager, he had a pudgy face, small mustache, and worried expression, and he was trying very hard, in his red vest and string tie, to appear open-minded. He had just showed me the model's letter of complaint, which sat, now, between us, on his desk.
The polar bear gave me a funny feeling
, the model had written;
I was under the mistaken impression that the bear was male, but much to my surprise it turned out that I was wrong. The bear was silent the whole time and never bothered to correct me
.

It was part of my
job
not to talk, I explained to the manager. I read to him from my Xeroxed rules sheet:
Animal representatives must not speak in a human manner but should maintain animal behavior and gestures at all times while in costume. Neither encourage nor dispel assumptions made regarding gender
. I said, See? I was holding my heavy white head like a motorcycle helmet in the folds of my lap, my own head sticking out of the bureau-sized shoulders, my bangs stuck to my forehead, a small, cross-shaped imprint on the tip of my nose from the painted wire screen nostril of the bear. I can't help my large stature, I told him. That's why they made me a bear and not one of those squirrels who gives away cereal. I was doing exactly what I was supposed to do. I was doing what I was designed to do.

She would like an apology, the manager said.

You say one becomes evil when one leaves the herd; I say that depends entirely on what the herd is doing, I told him.

Look, the manager said, his eyes shifting. Would you be willing to apologize? Yes or no. He reminded me of a guy I knew in high school—there was one in every high school—who made his own chain mail. They were both pale and rigidly hunch-shouldered, even as young men, as though they had constantly to guard the small territory they had been allotted in life.

Did you notice how in the letter she keeps referring to me as “the bear”? I said. No wonder she didn't know I was a girl, she doesn't even know I'm
human
! And incidentally, I added, when the manager said nothing, you would think she'd be more understanding of the requirements of my position—we are, after all, both performers.

The manager seemed offended that I would compare myself, a sweating, hulking bear, to a clean, famously fresh-faced girl, our local celebrity, and I was let go. This wasn't dinner theater, he said, and at headquarters, where he sent me, I was told I could continue to be a polar bear but not solo or in a contact setting. This meant I could work corporate shows, which in our area never occurred. I saw myself telling my story on “People's Court,”
on “Hard Copy,” but I was a big, unphotogenic girl and I knew people would not feel sympathy for me. Plus, in the few years since college I had been fired from every job I'd had, for actual transgressions—rifling aimlessly through a boss's desk drawers when she was out of the office; sweeping piles of hair into the space behind the refrigerator in the back room of a salon; stopping in my school bus, after dropping off the last of the children, for a cold Mr. Pibb at Suwannee Swifty—and I believed absolutely in retribution, the accrual of cosmic debt, the granting and revoking of amnesty. I was, simply, no longer innocent. I was not innocent, even as I protested my innocence.

No, I hadn't molested the girl, but even as I'd sat in the manager's office I could still smell the clean spice of her perfume, feel the light weight of her hands on either side of my head, a steady, intoxicating pressure even through plaster and fake fur. I could not fully believe myself, sitting there, to be an outraged, overeducated young woman in a bear suit. Beneath the heavy costume, I was the beast the manager suspected me of being, I was the bear.

The girl had been shopping with her mother, a bell-shaped generic older woman in a long lavender raincoat. The moment they rolled their cart around the corner into my aisle, still forty feet away, the model screamed. She was only eighteen, but still I was surprised—I would have thought Florida natives would be accustomed to seeing large animals in everyday life. She screamed: Oh my god, he's so cute! She ran for me, and I made some ambiguous bear gesture of acknowledgment and surprise. Hey there, sweetie, she said, pursing her lips and talking up into my face as though I were her pet kitten. I scooped a cone of chocolate chip for her but she didn't even notice. Mom, look, she yelled.

The lavender-coated mother approached without hurry or grace. Her face, up close, was like the Buddha's, and she took the ice cream from my paw automatically, as though we had an understanding. The model was rubbing my bicep with both of her narrow tanned hands. He's so soft, she said. I faced her, making large simpering movements, and noticed the small dark shapes of
her nipples, visible through her white lacy bodysuit. I blushed, then remembered I needn't blush, and that was when she reached for me, pulling my hot, oversized head down to her perfect, heart-shaped face. The kiss lasted only a moment, but in that moment I could feel how much she loved me, feel it surging through my large and powerful limbs.
I am the bear
, I thought. Then it was over, and I remembered to make the silly gestures of a human in a bear suit pretending to be embarrassed. The model's mother had produced a small, expensive-looking camera from some hidden pocket of her raincoat and matter-of-factly snapped a photo of me, a bear pretending to be a friendly human, with my arm around the model's skinny shoulders, my paw entangled in her silky, stick-straight golden hair.

They left then, the mother never speaking a word, and they were all the way down the aisle, almost to the other end, when the produce manager stuck his head around the corner right in front of them and yelled my name, I had a phone call. The model looked back once before they disappeared, and though she never saw my face—I wasn't allowed to take off my head in public—it was obvious from her expression that she understood. It was an expression of disturbed concern, the way she might look if she were trying to remember someone's name or the words to a song she once knew well, but there was something else, too, a kind of abashed sadness that looked out of place on her young, milky face.

• • •

I could imagine how she must have felt, having once fallen in love with an animal myself in the same swift, irrevocable way I imagined she had.
The Good-Night Horse
, he'd been called—that heading had appeared beside his picture on the wallpaper in our cottage's bathroom at the Sleepy Hollow resort, and the words stayed in my head for years, like a prayer. The wallpaper featured reprints of antique circus posters and flyers, the same six or seven over and over, but the Good-Night Horse was the only one
I paid attention to: he was a powerful black shape that seemed to move and change form like a pile of iron shavings under a magnet, quivering slightly. He was muscular, a stallion. I was six. “Katie is masturbating,” my mother said, in her mock-weary, matter-of-fact voice.

I would lie on the floor on my side under the toilet-paper dispenser, my face a few inches from the wall. The Good-Night Horse was shown in a series of four different postures. In the first two pictures he was wearing boots and trousers on his hind legs, but in the wild third picture, my favorite, he was tearing the trousers off dramatically. Clothes were flung on the ground all around him, his tail swished in the air, and the trousers waved wildly from his mouth. In the last picture he was, with his teeth, pulling back the covers of a single bed with a headboard, like my bed at home. “The World's Greatest Triumph of Animal Training,” the poster said.

There was no problem with my masturbating, because my parents were agnostic intellectuals; they had given me a booklet called “A Doctor Talks to Five- to Eight-Year-Olds” that included, as an example of the male genitalia, a photograph of Michelangelo's statue of David. The photo was small and black-and-white, so you couldn't really get a good look at what was between his legs, but it appeared lumpy and strange, like mashed potatoes, and I found it unsettling. The book had already given me a clear picture of sexual intercourse: it was a complicated, vaguely medical procedure in which you were hooked up to an adult man and microscopic transactions then occurred. And though my parents had said, “You're probably too young to picture it, but someday you'll understand,” I
could
picture it—I saw an aerial view of me, naked, and the statue of David lying side by side on a white-sheeted operating table, me in braids and of course only half his height. But this vision was the furthest thing from my mind when I looked at the Good-Night Horse.

I wasn't stupid, I knew people didn't marry horses, or any other animal. I just wasn't convinced that the Good-Night Horse
was necessarily an animal—the more I looked at his picture, the more he seemed to be a man in some important sense. It was not his clothes, or the tricks he did, but something both more mysterious and more obvious than that. He reminded me a little of Batman—and, like Batman, he might have a way of getting out of certain things, I thought. He was sensitive, certainly—his forelock hung boyishly, appealingly, over his eyes, and his ears stood up straight, pointing forward in a receptive manner (except in the trouser-flinging picture, where they lay flat back against his head)—but you could tell that he was in no way vulnerable, at least not to the schemes and assaults of ordinary men. He was actually
more
a man than ordinary men, and something began to swell in my chest unbearably after a few days, weighing me down so that I could not possibly get off the floor, and my father finally had to carry me, sobbing, from the bathroom. I was sobbing not only because the Good-Night Horse and I could never meet, but because I understood with terrible certainty, terrible finality, that I would never be happy with anything less.

And it was true that no man had yet lived up. I had been engaged once to a social theorist who was my age but refused to own a TV and said things like “perused” in regular conversation and expected what he called my “joyous nature” to liberate him, but it ended when I discovered while he was writing his thesis that he had not gotten around to treating his three cats for tapeworm and had been living with them—the cats and the worms—contentedly for weeks. And now, at twenty-eight, I only dated, each man seeming a degree more aberrant than the last. The last had been a stockbroker who was hyperactive (rare in adults, he said) and deaf in one ear—he yelled and slurred and spit when he talked and shot grackles with an AK-47 from his apartment window, but was wildly energetic even late at night, boyish and exuberant and dangerous all at once, a little like the horse. On our second and last date, however, he took me to an Irish pub to meet his old college roommate, and the roommate engaged me in an exchange of stomach-punching to show off how tightly he could clench his
abs, only when it was his turn to punch mine he grabbed my breasts instead, causing the stockbroker to go crazy. He dragged the roommate out onto the sidewalk and pushed him around like a piece of furniture he could not find the right place for, and I kept yelling that it was only a joke, I didn't mind, but in the scuffle the stockbroker's visor—the kind with the flashing colored lights going across the forehead band—got torn off and flung into the gutter, its battery ripped out, and when the fight was over he sat on the curb trying in vain to get it to light up again and saying, “He broke my fucking visor, man,” until I told him I was taking a cab home, at which point he spit, on purpose, in my face.