Women & Other Animals (3 page)

Late last winter, Jimmy Poke had called their house to say that one of his cows had walked out on the ice and fallen through. If there was a thaw, he said, the carcass would poison the water. Her mother could have the meat if they could get the cow out. Tinny had gone along but stayed on shore while her mom and two brothers went out with a rowboat. They took lengths of rope and a chain saw as well as a splitting maul to bust up the ice.

The cow in the water was frozen solid, and that was why they had to cut her legs off. As the chain saw buzzed, Tinny had buried her face in the shoulder of a Guernsey heifer. Her brothers tossed the legs one at a time toward the shore. The legs clattered as they skipped across the ice. If those cold white legs were there now, she would kick them into the compactor and bravely watch them snap. Last winter they had carried the frozen cow home in the back of the truck, and her brothers had skinned her and hung her body in the garage. The weather broke, and over the next few days the boys cut the meat from the bones. Her mother finished the job on the kitchen table, wrapping ugly fivepound chunks in freezer paper and gray tape.

The truckload of garbage was smashed into a tight package, and through the window of the little hut, Tinny Marie could see her mother laughing with the compactor man. Their mouths moved in speech she couldn't hear. When finally another truck pulled in and honked, the two strolled out, her mother with a full cup of coffee.

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From the truck cab roof, Tinny watched her mother place the cup on the dashboard below her. A ghost of steam formed above it on the windshield. Her mother turned the key and the truck made spiraling sounds until the engine caught. She yelled up, "Tinny Marie, what do you see?"

"The hill is my knee," she said. "My scab is a tree."

"Come on down and get in with me."

"I see a cow right now."

"Get in. We've got to go," said her mother.

"How about a onelegged crow." Tinny laughed at the vision she'd conjured up: a onelegged crow standing on that one leg, then flying off with no problem. She slid into the passenger's seat through the window. It'd been years since the door opened. They turned back onto Halfmoon Road and her mother waved goodbye to the compactor man. As they bumped over the pavement, Tinny watched Jimmy Poke's cows chew their cuds in the rearview mirror until they were lazy dots of fur. The pond shone like an icy mirror, then disappeared behind a hill.

"There's a
two
legged crow," said her mother.

"So?" Tinny hung partway out the window.

Her mother began to sing, "There lived an old Lord by the Northern Sea, bow down . . . " Tinny watched the marsh. The sun was warming the air, and the iced tips of the grasses were melting. When they crossed the shallow stream again, Tinny threw one of her yellow plastic barrettes into the current and watched it float and turn and fall behind them. When she got home, she'd run to the creek to wait for it and see how long it took to travel. Slowly, as if in a daydream, a giant black bird lifted itself into flight with a bony stretch of wings.

"Look! The biggest crow in the world," said Tinny. As her mother turned to see, the truck hit a pothole, and hot coffee splashed down the front of her mother's shirt.

She swore and pulled the shirt cloth away from her. Tinny saw another truck was coming toward them, and her mother was not paying attention. She squeezed her eyes shut and gritted her teeth until she heard her mother resume singing, "I gave my loove a gay gold ring, the boughs they bend to me . . . "

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Tinny Marie opened her eyes slowly. The truck had not hit them. Their own truck had not been reduced to shattered glass and bent steel, nor she and Mother to bloody muscle and splintered bone. Their limbs would not be severed, and they would not be tossed piece by piece into the compactor to be crushed. Her mother apparently hadn't noticed how close they'd come to dying, for she just smiled at Tinny and took another drink of what coffee remained in her cup. The truck bounced and rattled on. Tinny spotted the big crow soaring above the marsh. It swooped clumsily to rest at the top of a swamp oak, on a tiny branch that bent beneath its weight. Tinny Marie turned backward in her seat to watch the crow flap its wings to keep its balance. She longed to view the world from such a height.

"I'll fly to the top of that big crow's tree," said Tinny Marie.

"Long as I can see you, and you can see me," said her mother.

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Gorilla Girl

When beer is mixed and left to ferment and bread is set out to rise, they sometimes collect wild yeasts; these foreigners drop out of the jet stream or rise up from the bowels of the planet, unwelcome particles which give the finished product a sharp flavor. I suspect this is what happened to my mother when she was pregnant with me. Sometime during the first trimester she must have let her guard down, perhaps in the public toilet at the flea market in Paw Paw; in a moment of inattention, something airborne and bony slipped inside her to poison the brew, something like a curse.

If I cared to describe the details of my birth and the ecstasy of release from that suffocating maternal clench, you might question whether I actually recall such an early event. In fact, I recall in miserable detail this and every sensation that has followed in the tangled and knotted lifeline connecting that howling newborn to me, seventeen years later. I recall that despite the humid heat of the southern Michigan summer, my parents kept me at optimum temperature with air conditioning, and in the bitter winter I was warmed by a cleanburning gas furnace whose filter they changed regularly. Despite these ideal conditions, I was an unhappy baby, screaming during the day and most of the night as well, whether flat on my back or rolled onto my stomach, whether a gentle breeze Page 16

blew or the night was still. When I found toys or even blankets in my crib, I tossed them out, unwilling to submit to their paltry comforts. On my parents' shelves are the guidebooks they purchased during this time:
Doctor Spock's Baby and Child Care, Bringing Up Baby, Saving Yourself from Baby
.

It seems foolish to suggest that my having resulted from an accidental conception should have made any difference. And certainly my mother was wrong about my problem ever having been colic, for had it been colic, I'd have been feeling better by the time I was using complete sentences to demand rarecooked meat and glass after glass of cool water. For years my parents tried to sustain the illusion that I was a normal girl, but my siblings learned by trial and error to keep away from me. My brother broke his wrist the time I pushed him off the roof—before ordering me down, he first should have considered how precariously near the edge he stood. As a kindergartner, I bit my sister's leg so badly that she needed six stitches. Throughout those early years, I yelled for food at the first pang of hunger, bathed irregularly, and threw things, so my bedroom floor was a pool of broken dishes, torn books, and drywall dust. My father, a dedicated actuary, replaced my broken windows with plexiglass. In photographs from this time, I have a red and swollen look.

At school I tried to wait my turn for the playground swing or a particular crayon, but after a minute or so, I would yield to my monster and seize the object of desire.

Even the most mundane acts—such as my fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Mitschlager, straightening and restraightening the stack of papers on her desk—could drive me to a frenzy. The school psychologist was averse to prescribing Ritalin or other drugs to ''bright" children such as me, and my sense of selfpreservation told me that in this man's presence I ought to be on my best behavior. He scolded my parents and teachers. Weren't my verbal skills superb? he said. When I did apply myself to math, wasn't I doing it at a level above my classmates? I needed to be loved and challenged, he said, and my fits of rage would diminish. And if Mrs. Mitschlager complained that I snarled in response to her questions, then perhaps she shouldn't call on me.

During the day, my outbursts reduced my tension and body heat,

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but nights alone in my room were nearly unbearable. In order to go to sleep, I practiced cursing, and sometimes could enunciate verbal strings such as, "Fuckingmotherfuckingsonofabitchcuntsuckingcock" without degenerating into animal sounds. If this didn't help me sleep, I banged my head against the headboard or squeezed my hands together until the bones ached. Apart from this occasional selfinfliction of pain, however, I did not touch myself. If my hand fell across my stomach in sleep, I soon awoke to a sensation of burning skin. Sometimes even the brush of my blankets and pajamas was too much, and I tossed them off as I had done in my crib and slept naked with my legs apart and arms out to my sides.

Tommy Pederson was the biggest and meanest boy in our fourth grade class, and every day at lunch, he and his cronies hung kids upside down from the monkey bars to empty their pockets. The time they grabbed me, they flipped me so my underpants were displayed for all. As if that were not enough, Tommy pushed his grubby finger under the elastic of those underpants and touched the folded skin between my legs. As gravity sent blood to my face, I willed myself to become a superstrong monster—Frankenstein and Rubberman in one—and I twisted my new form around to bite Tommy Pederson's forearm through his jean jacket. He screamed and fell, and we wrestled in the sand. At one point he straddled me, pinning my arms, but when I knocked his head with mine he let go. Once atop him, I grabbed a plastic lunch box and clobbered him with it until his head fell back into the sand, until drool and snotty blood rolled down his face. I recall both the pleasure of winning and the disappointment of realizing that Tommy was not going to fight anymore.

In earlier matches, I had kicked kids or smacked them or wrested swing set chains from them but had never engaged in a full body match, unfurling all my strength. In the afterglow of this contest, my head was clear, and my body felt as calm as the center of my own storm, released momentarily from both the volcanic pressure within and the oceanic weight pressing from outside. My limbs swung loose, and I freefloated as though gravity had been lifted. When I got home that afternoon, my mother was sitting near the phone, sobbing into folded arms.

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After school I spent time outofdoors in our quiet neighborhood of ranch homes attached to twocar garages, and I took pleasure in capturing insects. A tight vibration of wings sounded against my teeth as I held a grasshopper steady between my tongue and hard palate, anticipating the thrill of biting into that alien skin and extinguishing life. Crickets snapped against the top of my mouth until I ground them between my molars. Sky green praying mantises raked their arms against my gums, begging for reprieve even after I'd severed their thoraxes from their abdomens.

"What on earth are you doing?" screamed my mother the time she saw me put a june bug into my mouth.

"Nothing." I closed my teeth, crunched the shell, and swallowed.

"What's in your mouth?" She moved closer, right into my face.

"Nothing." I thrust my tongue toward her. The corners of her mouth recoiled from me, and she released a little shriek. I felt with my finger and found a june bug leg with ridges the length of it, ending in a small black foot. I smeared it onto my jeans. Rather than admonish me, she walked away, plump arms dangling in defeat.

The Sandersons, four houses down from us, kept a pit bull. He paced in his cage like a zoo beast, jaws slavering, mottled stripes stretching and contracting over his torso. Often I approached to watch him throw his body against the chain link. With his armor of muscle pushing out against his skin, he seemed to embody the turbulence of my own corporeality. I could fall asleep to the crazed barking as peacefully as another child to a lullaby. If I knelt on hands and knees before his cage and concentrated hard enough, my own body began to change. My teeth sharpened and grew longer—I could feel them with my tongue. My limbs thinned, my chest pulped with muscle, and I flinched at the sharp pain of sprouting a tail from my backside. As I became an animal, the pressure inside my skin lessened, the feeling of too much heat and too much blood racing through tiny venous caverns subsided. One day, however, I forgot to hide behind the Sandersons' inkberry bushes and attempted my transformation in view of their living room. Father and mother, brother and sister, the cartoon family clutched each other in horror. I should have stopped when I saw them but was

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loathe to leave my sublime state. When I threw my head up and growled at them, they phoned my mother, who revived me with a yank to my front paw, propelling me too quickly back into my own pink and inadequate flesh, ruining me.

I snarled and tugged at her slacks with my teeth. The thready affections I felt toward my mother further shriveled beside the sturdiness of my rage, and yet something always prevented me from physically harming her. It didn't take a neargenius IQ to recognize that I was to blame for her misery, and something like guilt even pricked me on occasion, but such feelings were pebbles at the bottom of my stomach while madder passions rushed through me like white water. After she dragged me home, I stomped upstairs, kicked a new hole in the drywall under my window, and began chewing my hand, working it the way the pit bull worked his rawhide, biting to feel the force of teeth on both sides, stopping just short of puncturing the skin.

Perhaps if my parents had beaten me, or even spanked me, there would have been some relief. Perhaps by transference, the release of their anger would have diminished some of my own. But the anger of the family—if not of the whole lower peninsula of Michigan—was concentrated in me. The others in my family were driven by feeble emotions like heartbreak, astonishment, and some happiness. My parents, after all, were peaceful people who lamented only in silence the forgotten pill, or the broken condom, or the illfitting diaphragm—whatever misadventure caused that one over energized sperm to penetrate the defenses and pierce the shell of my mother's egg. Or perhaps the egg itself had kicked away the diaphragm, torn the condom, taken the dumb sperm by the tail and devoured it.