Women & Other Animals (20 page)

But now that the celery was growing here again, folks didn't have to leave this neighborhood the way she and her mother had. People could plant and tend huge gardens that watered themselves from below, and if they canned and froze, the vegetables could feed them half the winter. People's houses could be cleaned and painted, and windows could be thrown open to let in the sweet peppery smell. Plaster and drywall could be patched so that spiders were relegated to attics, and people's lives could be made lush the way they once were, as fertile as when her granny worked the celery.

Georgina adjusted the rearview mirror and in it saw Andy walking toward her from the road. Andy had grown up far from the river, in the neighborhood Georgina and her mother moved to when Georgina was fifteen, a neighborhood like the one she lived in now, where the ranch houses had decorative shutters, aluminum or vinyl siding, and attached garages. Georgina first had made out with Andy in his father's car, and then they'd had furious sex at every opportunity in his parents' paneled basement. Once he had torn her shirt in his hurry to undress her. She'd told herself he was passionate, but she knew now that he was devouring her the way she used to eat those cheap pastries she bought with her nightcrawler money, without even tasting them.

She turned to watch Andy lumber toward her, his boots sinking with each step. Georgina's white tennis shoes were still clean as they stretched for the pedals. She hadn't bogged down as she walked,

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partly because she was lighter than Andy, but also because she knew how to place her feet on this kind of mud. Andy saw nothing in this neighborhood but wood to steal and, in November, deer to shoot at. Outside Georgina's bedroom window, the deer used to travel through the morning fog like the starved ghosts of ponies, alone or in families, on their way to drink at the river. The deer were the food of last resort. In or out of season, a person shot one if he needed the meat and dressed it out on his own kitchen table. For Andy's ignorant selfishness, the mud would swallow him.

The truck windows were rolled up, and Georgina locked the doors with the automatic button as Andy reached her. He pulled on the door handle, but Georgina looked away and fiddled with the radio, turning channels until she found a female voice wailing on a country station. Georgina turned up the volume loud enough that she couldn't hear Andy, and she put her finger on top of the door lock button each time he inserted his key and tried to turn it. Georgina watched the mouth she had not been able to stop kissing in that basement rec room and on a honeymoon hotel bed in Mexico. The mouth shouted, barely audible above the radio, "Let me in the goddamn truck. You're gonna get it stuck worse."

At their wedding reception, she and Andy had fed each other mouthfuls of a threetiered wedding cake that Georgina had chosen from among a hundred nearly identical designs. Then they'd returned to their table, each with a single tower of pure white cake. Georgina ate her own piece, scraped the plate and licked the fork, while Andy ate about half of his and ignored the rest. When he later clunked the plate with a beer glass, his remaining cake toppled and lay collapsed.

Georgina looked straight ahead toward the river as she shifted into first, what Andy called "crawl," what the men from this neighborhood called "swamp gear." The wheels all began to spin beneath her.

Andy's face grew red outside the window. Georgina jammed the big knob into second gear. The wheels spun faster, and Georgina felt the truck sink. As she shifted into third, Andy began pounding on the glass with both fists. In his crybaby desperation he looked like an even bigger man than he was. Just over a year ago, in his Page 134

rented tuxedo, he had picked up Georgina in her dolly lace and, to the cheers of his brother and friends, carried her squealing out to the parking lot, slung over his shoulder like something he'd shot up north. Now mud from the front tires flew all over him, up his big left arm, onto his cheek, like cake raining on him, a crazy chocolate cake tossed handful after handful by some dirty, badass bride.

Georgina looked over her shoulder and saw a policeman at the edge of the road, slimhipped with his arms crossed over his chest, probably the guy who'd called her

"ma'am." Andy's little brother appeared beside the cop, his mouth hanging open as usual, his monkey arms dangling. No doubt Andy's brother intended to pull this truck out with his own truck. They'd had it all figured out, except they hadn't counted on Georgina showing up. She shifted into fourth at four thousand revolutions per minute. She thought of the apple cake her granny used to make every fall, "plain apple cake" she used to call it, and Georgina's salivary glands shot spit through her mouth.

Andy fell away from the side of the truck and leaned against a tree, an immense swamp oak thrusting upward like the world's biggest celery stalk, a tree that had somehow defeated the chain saws of a thousand men like Andy who couldn't grow anything but grass. On the other side of the truck, the smallheaded man watched patiently with no expression, as if he saw this sort of thing all the time, as if just yesterday he'd seen the farmer march down from the hill and shoot his daughter's pony, as if Georgina, the cop, Andy, and his brother were just another collection of fools. Georgina closed her eyes and floored the accelerator pedal. As the wheels beneath her tore at the ground, she felt herself easing that pony free. She saw herself smashing layer after layer of her wedding cake with both fists. With the big wheels of the truck, she imagined she was cultivating, at last, the heavy black river earth that a generation had neglected.

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Running

The path behind my house joins a dirt road leading to Turtle Lake, and on that road my nextdoor neighbor's fifteenyearold daughter, Amber, is parked with a guy in a Camaro. The nine hundred acres including Turtle Lake was willed to the Audubon Society by a detergent king who had no descendants, and it is now preserved as a bird sanctuary and wetland. Most evenings I jog the path around the lake, about three miles. Days I work as a biologist in the company founded by the detergent king, now a pharmaceuticals research firm, and I live in a house that the company located for my husband and me in order to lure us to Michigan. My husband is a chemist, and my own current research involves the animaltesting phase of a drug which shows promise in preventing breast cancer.

When I cross the dirt road, I pass within ten feet of the Camaro, but neither Amber nor the boy notices me. Teenagers ignore married women in their thirties who are not their teachers or their mothers or their friends' mothers. Teenagers make out in cars here all the time and sometimes brave the muck to swim, but with the exception of Amber, the birds interest me far more. Amber has long, straight, lemoncolored hair, a vibrant hue she conjured up recently, perhaps to distress her mother. Presently, the back of her head is pressed against the passengerside window and her face Page 136

and fingers are obscured by the boy whose back and hair she is grasping. Just last night I saw her stubbed fingernails with their dark, chipped polish, and I've listened to her mother Jackie repeatedly on the subject of nailbiting. Amber's mother has offered her thirty dollars if she'll stop chewing her nails for a month.

For the last few weeks, male redwinged blackbirds have been staking out territories as they're doing now, perching on sumacs and last year's cattails, scrawking at one another across the marsh, exposing their red epaulettes and rippling their shoulders to make the marks throb. Brownstreaked females peck seeds nearby. They seem disinterested, but soon they'll perk up and choose mates. The females build their nests close to the ground.

My husband and I are not inclined toward having children, though lately I haven't felt entirely settled in this decision. When my husband takes a position, he tends to embrace it wholeheartedly. (''Think of all that college tuition we're going to save!" he told his sister on the phone recently, giving a cheerful response to one of her critical comments. "Be happy. This way we can leave our fortune to
your
kids.") But I worry that if I express my doubts, he might suddenly change his mind and want children as much as he doesn't want them now.

Amber's mom Jackie has one child and no husband. I've only gotten to know Jackie because she is bursting to talk about Amber the minute the girl goes off to school, and in all but the worst weather I'm sitting outside drinking coffee at that time, watching the feeders from a bench my husband built for me. This morning, from opposite sides of the splitrail fence, Jackie and I watched Amber get on the bus.

"Two weeks until school's out," said Jackie. "One more absence and she fails the semester."

Jackie was wearing her terrycloth robe, and I noticed the rectangle of her crushproof cigarette pack in the pocket. After Amber leaves for school, Jackie usually goes back to bed.

"They've got a strict policy at that school," said Jackie. "Ten absences, you flunk."

"That is strict," I said. I approve of strict policies.

"I found cigarettes in her backpack last night."

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I could have told Jackie that children of parents who smoke tend to smoke. I could have told her that rifling through her daughter's belongings will destroy whatever trust they have between them. As a nonparent, however, I nodded and sipped coffee.

"She told me they were her friend's cigarettes, that she was carrying them for a friend."

Before I quit smoking, the best cigarette of the day was always the first one, the one I used to have at this time with my coffee, after my lungs had cleaned themselves during sleep.

"She expects me to believe that," said Jackie. "Does she think I'm stupid?"

I shook my head in sympathy. Parenting and growing up both seem like overwhelming prospects, far more difficult than quitting smoking and maintaining a program of exercise.

At the stream which feeds Turtle Lake, I clatter over a wood and metal bridge. Before it empties, the stream meanders over a marsh, where I sometimes see great blue herons and, on a good day, less common species such as green herons and loons. During the spring migration birdcount, my husband and I sighted a wood duck perched on a dead branch above the water. His harlequin pattern of green, blue, burgundy, and white looked like a map of the world. And why shouldn't the world be drawn on a duck? And why not on a duck that was hunted nearly to extinction at the turn of the century, probably by the very people who admired it most, the people who should have been taking care of the population. If a particular female of this species builds a safelooking nest twelve feet above the ground in a good tree, other females will drop by and lay their eggs in it, which is why one female may be seen herding as many as forty tiny, fluffy ducklings toward the water. With so many predators about, however, many of them don't survive the trip.

When I am as far from my house and Amber's boyfriend's car as this path takes me, I spy a male and female mallard in the grass. The female shakes her tail feathers.

The male nudges closer, not quite touching her. As I pass, the ducks shift nervously and pause in their ritual. A few days ago, in this same spot, two male mallards were jumping on a female, almost crushing her. The female kept

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slipping out from under and waddling forward, but before she could get the momentum to take flight, one or the other would jump on her again.

My neighbor Jackie's face always looks tired, but she has beautiful dark eyes and straight teeth, very white against her bronzed skin. Perhaps she doesn't know that the artificial light in tanning salons can do nearly as much damage as sunlight. She has the slimhipped figure that until recently I thought exercise might give me. Earlier this week I asked her, "How do you stay in shape?" Jackie's nails are longish and always red; mine are clipped short and unpolished.

"I'm a waitress, remember. I run my ass off eight hours a shift." She crushed out a cigarette on the top fencerail and snapped the butt into her own grass. "Pretty birds, those yellow ones." She motioned with a nod. I have read that when food is hard to find, some overstressed parent birds feed their screaming young bits of plastic and cigarette butts.

A halfdozen male goldfinches have appeared on and around the thistle feeder this week, their winter graygreen exchanged for brilliant yellow. Goldfinches breed late into the season, either raising several broods a year or waiting until August or even September to make a nest. Last year we had a surprise ice storm in October that killed a particularly late batch of goldfinch chicks in our side yard. Because the leaves had not yet fallen, the weight from the ice bent trees and bushes to the ground, and from the woods behind our house we heard the gunshots of breaking limbs. My husband and I shoveled through the slush the next morning and buried the chicks, nest and all. For a week I didn't walk in the woods for fear of what other dead birds and animals I might find.

Jackie has given Amber a nine o'clock curfew on school nights, but because of her work hours she is often not there to enforce it. When I first met Jackie, I figured she was older than me, but she is only thirtytwo, which means she had Amber when she was seventeen. Premature wrinkling is another good reason not to smoke.

Running is something, like smoking, that I've left and come back to dozens of times, but I haven't smoked since we moved into this house, and I've been a more dedicated runner as well. In high

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school, I belonged to the debate club and the science club, but I should have joined the crosscountry team, because it took me a decade to learn what the coach and gym teacher would have taught me in a season about running and my body. When I was Amber's age, I was not pretty, and my real concern was getting a scholarship at a good college, so maybe it's not surprising that I didn't have any boyfriends.

Excepting the occasional detention, Amber evidently doesn't participate in any sanctioned afterschool activities.

"Amber isn't in anything?" I asked, surprised.

Her mother gave me a puzzled look and exhaled smoke. "What would she be in?"