Women & Other Animals (4 page)

One evening while they ate supper in the kitchen, I sat with my TV tray in the living room. I usually watched the news in hopes of seeing fires or foreign brutalities, but today I had found
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
. When good Dr. Jekyll turned into evil Mr. Hyde, hair sprouted from the backs of my hands in sympathy. "I am free!"

shouted Mr. Hyde. "I am free!" He could whip that Irish girl like a horse now, just as I could whack Tommy Pederson with a lunch box while he wept and drooled.

Laughter tinkled from the kitchen. My

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sister was on the middle school basketball team, and my family was celebrating some victory of hers with no idea what fate might await them. I twisted my mouth and imagined myself swaggering into the kitchen, knocking their microwaveable dishes to the floor and throttling their soft necks, one after another. I finished my dinner, imagining it was live bugs and amphibians instead of meat loaf and string beans, and then I chewed my thumb until it bled.

When my parents noticed my new form of selfmutilation, they bribed me with a promise of a
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
book with over a hundred photo stills from the movie, and sent me to a real psychologist, Dr. Radcliff. Throughout several sessions, I growled in his office, halfheartedly willing my transformation to pit bull terrier at the reduced rate of sixty dollars an hour. He watched me, amused, arms crossed over his chest. He was a cleancut man in his thirties, broad in the shoulders and not tall, apparently married to the rabbitlike blonde gritting her teeth in the photo on his desk. After a couple of weeks, when I finally deigned to sit in his patient's chair, he let loose with his twisted behaviorist theory. Whatever I felt, he said, was fine, just don't let on to anybody. Selfcontrol was the key to survival.

"When you are older, eighteen or so," said Radcliff, "you can sleep in a doghouse, but for now, just pretend to be a civilized girl so they don't put you away or give you shock therapy. Humor your mother and eat your oatmeal instead of bugs, for God's sake." I did give up the bugs, but not for God's sake or my mother's. There was something about Radcliff's bulldog chest and forearms, his sweatycologne smell, and the Dracula green eyes. While the school psychologist had never stopped chattering and humoring me, Radcliff could sit silent for a full fifty minutes, waiting for me to answer a single question. I came to view him as a mentor, a man who refused to be shocked or seduced, a solid wall against which I could ram myself without fear of breaking it down.

Things went more smoothly for the next few years, until, as the school's brainnumbing health movies had promised, I began to menstruate. When I first discovered blood flowing from my nether regions, I was ecstatic. But by the third month, I realized there would never be more than a trickle. Why? I screamed at my mother.

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Why all the goddamned fuss over this? To better express myself, I stomped into the backyard and pulled her rose bushes out of the ground with my bare hands, puncturing my palms, fingers and forearms with hundreds of thorns. I tossed the uprooted bushes at my mother and shook off those that stuck to me.

As I pounded bloody fists on the picture window and cursed her, my mother was on the phone arranging an emergency meeting with Radcliff. She cleaned me up before bringing me in, but I found a paper clip on Radcliff's carpet and toyed with it while he spoke. "You're really upsetting your mother," he said. I pushed the end of the paper clip deep into one after another of the thorn holes, so that each in turn began to dribble blood. When Radcliff realized what I was doing, he swooped like a bat and slapped me full across the face. "Jesus fucking Christ!" he said and grabbed my shoulders. "Do you want to be locked up? Because that's what's going to happen if you don't stop this shit. Am I getting through?" He throttled my shoulders and shook me, his thumbs digging into my chest. "Think tranquilizers. Think electrodes." The sting from his slap radiated outward until my whole body buzzed with calm.

"Tell your mother you're sorry," he said, loosening his grip.

I shook my head yes. He let go of me, but I still felt his fingers, and I hoped there'd be bruises.

Phys Ed had always been my favorite class, and in my sophomore year the gym teacher and track coach Ms. Heart cautiously invited me to join the track team. For months I had sensed her sizing up the wall of muscle beneath my skin, muscle as strong as chain mail, as tight as a straightjacket. After the first day of practice, she declared I was a mile runner. By the end of the season I would hold the school record for the mile, and in my junior year I would break the state record by more than a second. Each day Ms. Heart gave me a program written on an index card which took about three hours to complete. Sometimes before I could finish, I vomited behind the bleachers. The other girls slacked off, postured for the boys' track team, then lied to Heart about what they had done or else invented maladies. Heart was unsympathetic; running, she said, was the cure for cramps, headaches, and allergies. In her, as in Radcliff, I had an Page 22

ally, a person who wouldn't turn soft, a constant force willing me to be stronger. When I jogged evenings in our neighborhood, it felt as though there were two of me: the person I saw in the mirror and that second creature with teeth like a pit bull, leashed and dragging a concrete block.

On a particularly warm spring day, after sprinting a quartermile around the track, I stood panting, hands on knees, near the high jump pit. A redhaired boy lay in the sun on the landing pad, one arm bent behind his head, the other absentmindedly stroking his bare chest. He looked at me, as luxurious as a cat yawning, and let his thumb drift and then pause over his nipple. I became sensible of the wad between his legs. The heat from my own body was suddenly suffocating me, and I imagined that the boy's skin was cool. Only then did I realize how running and lifting weights had changed me. No longer was my muscle a single sheet beneath my skin, a rubbery exoskeleton holding me together. Each muscle in my arms and legs now felt like a separate creature, ready to chew through my skin and escape. When I was able to move, I sprinted around the school to the crosscountry path where I ran six miles without stopping.

There's no sense pretending that I hadn't become goodlooking. Though my father resembled a sea cow, my mother and siblings were handsome enough. If the monster Medusa had been the most beautiful creature in the ocean at one time, why not me? My black hair dangled in ropes to my shoulders—I hadn't the patience to brush it as my mother implored, and I cut it myself with blunt scissors, letting the ends fall to my bedroom floor. Often after a race, or even while I searched my hall locker, a circle of observers formed around me, at a safe distance, not close enough to touch me. In fact, nobody ever dared touch me until late one night when I was legpressing the maximum weight on the Universal machine, rhythmically pushing the pedals away with my bare feet, then easing them back with a clank. At the same time, I was planning a paper for my sociology class, shaping long, convincing sentences I could never compose while motionless.

Like a shaft of light, Heart's aroma of sweat, rubber, and cocoa

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butter spiked the room. Strong, small hands reached from behind and began to massage my shoulders and the back of my neck, speeding the flow of my blood. I closed my eyes and let my head fall to the side, moaning with each exhalation. But when she let her hands, dark veins erect on their backs, slide down over my biceps so they touched my breasts, the whole room began to throb. My vision blurred. I extended my legs to lift the stack of iron weights, tossed back my head, and roared like a jungle beast stuck with an arrow. Heart gasped, pulled away her hands, and ran from the room. I continued to howl, out of my mind with heat and confusion, wanting to stroke Heart's stringy, muscled limbs, and wanting to squeeze her leathery throat while she gasped for breath.

In the lobby of Radcliff's office, at my next regular appointment, I thumbed through issues of
National Geographic
, tapping my foot wildly, absentmindedly stabbing myself with my house key, imprinting tiny, Vshaped wounds up and down my legs and arms. An article about big cats said they moved at speeds up to sixty miles per hour. Imagine the sting of the wind at such a velocity. An article about the great apes featured women researchers with gorillas.
King Kong
was one of my favorite movies, so these gorillas disappointed. Far from being bloodthirsty, they were gentle and strictly vegetarian. I had assumed they would eat grubs and insects at the very least. Hell, Kong had practically eaten people.

Radcliff seemed distracted, so I asked what he knew about the great apes, and he started up about how intelligent they were. King Kong had been plenty smart, I commented, and Radcliff laughed. He liked to think that I no longer wanted to be an animal, but at that very moment, I was concentrating on becoming a movie gorilla.

As I felt the first pricklings of wild hair sprout from my pores, my insides began to quake. A tidal wave gained momentum. Floodgates threatened to burst. The big rock clogging the mouth of the volcano rattled in its niche.

Never had the transformation been like this. To stop myself, I told Radcliff about the incident with Heart. What had I felt? he asked. "I burned like a furnace," I said. "I roared like a lion."

Radcliff pushed his papers onto the floor. He dropped to his knees

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and laid his head on my lap. "I love you," he said, without warning or preamble. "I've loved you since you were eleven and you wanted to be a dog. God forgive me."

His head was heavy on my legs. I placed my open hand on the side of his face, which was bigger and more ghoulish up close. I pushed a strand of hair, gray and soft, behind his ear and slid the tips of my nailbitten fingers between his beefy neck and the collar of his shirt. I leaned close to rub my cheek against his sandpaper face. As the musk of his sweat and aftershave seeped into my skin, my insides began to unfold and swell as though waves of flesh emanated from a hot liquid core. Radcliff's moist breath poured over my thigh, inflaming the skin. Though I wanted to caress him, I also foamed and bubbled like an angry cauldron.

A nervous seaweedy eye stared up from my lap. Was this pathetic swamp creature the man for whom I gave up the delicacies of the grasshopper family? Was this my champion of selfcontrol? Was this the Frankenstein's chest against which I could hurl myself? My affections shriveled to a pea and fell to the floor of my stomach. He lifted a hand toward mine, but its pale fingers disgusted me, and I shoved him off my lap. "Assholebastard," I tried to say, but it came out as a snarl. "Sonofaarrrrg,"

I growled, slamming the door behind me. The receptionist looked up through tiny eyes, alarmed, and I kicked her steel desk, making a sound that reverberated through the lobby. All the way home, I sputtered and spat, unable to form curses.

As I lay uncovered in the dark that night, tormented by thoughts of Radcliff, Heart, and the redhaired boy, I was driven to stroke my own naked chest. The blood rose to the surface of my skin, but I continued. My hands moved as if on a Ouija board across my stomach and between my legs, and once having given myself over to this adventure, I couldn't stop. The sensation I had felt in Radcliff's office now overwhelmed me, the unfolding away from some intense center—a dense flower whose leadheavy petals grew from inside faster than I could tear them away. I rubbed myself until the muscles of my hands ached, bringing forth at least a dozen explosions of flesh, each one more excruciating than the last. My eyes rolled back so far I feared the muscles would snap. Once I screamed so loudly Page 25

that my brother and father came running. I turned away and faked sleep, cupping my crotch until they left, pitiful stick figures.

Instead of relaxing or relieving, each climax further tormented me. My skin pumped sweat, and the flesh between my legs swelled and grew numb. I wept furiously into my pillow and bit it until feathers flew out. Finally I ripped the screen out of my window, jumped twelve feet to the grass, and filled my lungs with night air. Savoring the sting of the pavement on my bare feet, I ran naked through empty subdivision streets until I fell exhausted onto a manicured lawn a few miles away. I grasped some rose bushes and squeezed until the thorns punctured my hands. My blood had been altered, infused with sex. No longer would exercise suffice. I needed to be bled like a gypsy horse.

By entangling myself in the arms of something like a hundred men, I hoped to find one who would satisfy me, one who could give me a kind of pleasure which did not make me want to jump off a high building. The promise of each seemed great, but each failed me in turn. Once in a while, in the heated strangeness of passion, I felt the presence of my own male part, coexisting with my female organs. However, at this prompt, my mate's penis seemed to shrivel up inside of him and disappear. He became a receptacle, passive, small in proportion to me despite the physical facts to the contrary. However strong the men seemed, they longed, by the end, to be conquered. Fathers of neighborhood children, teachers, clerks at the grocery store, even Dr. Radcliff.

Radcliff was the biggest disappointment. Because of our years together, I thought he might be my match, but after an initial blaze, he fizzled and sank below the surface like the rest, and like the rest, he tried to drag me down with him. As he slept, I buzzed with energy and looked around his woodpaneled bedroom, overcome by the sensation that I had just given birth to him. Wasn't this the very picture of my rage? My strong body wrapped furiously around a limp and weakened man? His pale, spent penis touched his leg and rested upon the delicate and alien cushion of his scrotum. Tiny, raw, unprotected—here was the shape of the thing that infuriated me.

His skin was cool, and I was on fire. I could crush those parts, first holding them lightly in my mouth and then biting down.

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Radcliff was my second to last experiment. The following day, I bit the UPS delivery man so passionately that he went to the emergency room. Nights afterward, I lay alone in bed, grinding my teeth and trying to keep my hands at my sides but always, in the end, sacrificing myself to the horrible ecstasy.