Women & Other Animals (5 page)

In the last week of August, the fair came to town. On opening night I elbowed my way through the directionless mob. When I saw a girl from the track team, I spit at the ground. I got French fries with vinegar and ate them so hot they burned my mouth. Men lured me to play their coin games, their tossing and shooting games, but when I turned my Medusa gaze on them, they stopped cajoling. Their voices changed to whispers, their male parts shriveled.

At the far end of the midway, I paid two dollars to view ''Samba of the Jungle: See Her Change Before Your Eyes." I handed the fat man my dollar and followed an anemiclooking kid into the tent. A blonde in a frayed, leopardspotted wrap stood behind the bars of a cage on the dimly lit platform. Her eyes fluttered as if she were in a trance, but otherwise she remained still as patrons filtered in. When the overhead lights went out, a recorded circus voice scratched, "See Samba, a woman found in the jungles of Africa. A scientist studied her until they found him in his laboratory, torn to pieces by this shebeast."

The shebeast's skin was pasty; I wondered where in the jungle she'd found peroxide for her lousy bleach job. Varicose veins snaked down below her ratty dress.

What had seemed at first a trance now looked like drunkenness. As the lights dimmed further, her face began to glow and change—her hair darkened, her features thickened, and then the tent went black. A spotlight flicked on, and a gorilla burst out of her cage and leapt into the audience. The other patrons screamed and ran for the exit. The ape jumped off the stage and roared into my face through rubber teeth. I fell to the grassy floor and pounded the earth as tears of pure joy streamed across my face. When the lights came on, the gorilla suit shook its head and humped back onto the stage and behind the curtain. I paid again and this time watched closely. As the woman's face lit up, I saw the pinpoint of light projecting from a spot above and behind the Page 27

audience; a movie of the transformation was being shown on her face. The falseness of the act, however, didn't bother me—the poor woman simply hadn't learned to change herself yet. In the dark, at the back of the tent, hair sprouted sympathetically on my arms and legs.

Before I visited the Samba show the next morning, I saw the gorillablonde walking to the cinderblock public bathrooms. I ran to catch up with her. Here was a comrade, a fellow fury, a woman who yearned to be a beast.

"Hey, I saw your show."

"Leave me alone," she slurred and hastened her stumbly walk.

"But we're sisters, don't you see," I insisted, my voice unusually clear. "We both need to transform."

"Stay the hell away from me." Her bluish throat quivered.

I grabbed her frizzy hair and pulled her around to face me. She fluttered alcoholic eyes. Booze seeped from her glands, and the stale odor incensed me. I slapped her twice. She scratched at my face with her nails, but I grabbed her hands and squeezed her finger bones together until she fell to her knees. When I let go, she shook out her hands and started walking away, saying she would get the police, so I tackled her on the dirty lawn of flattened snow cone cups and cigarette butts and dragged her into the empty women's room. With my teeth I shredded the bottom of my shirt into ropes of cloth and tied her to the toilet seat. I held one hand over her mouth as I stripped her support hose from her hips and legs with the other, and then I gagged her with them. Now
I
was King Kong, only this dulleyed bride wasn't coming with me. I locked the stall door and climbed out over the top. Samba of the jungle, my ass. She didn't deserve the distinction.

My plan crystallized as I walked, and the midway crowd opened for me at every turn. I bought French fries, but they were lukewarm, and I tossed them onto the ground in front of a policeman leaning against a temporary barrier. He looked into my eyes before deciding not to speak. I browsed the boutique trailers and then settled upon an oversized, tigerstriped shirt, which I put on as a dress behind a cotton candy stand. I returned to the Samba exhibit Page 28

where I found the fat man who had taken my money sitting behind a sign, "Outtolunch." I informed him—his name was Mr. Boone—that his jungle girl was indisposed, and I would be taking her place.

"What the hell are you talking about?" His feet were crossed up on the entrance gate. His neck was red and bristly above an overtaxed pocket Tshirt. He paused to suck from a bottle of blackberry brandy. "Wait," he said, pointing a thick finger at me. "I've seen you hanging around."

"Fire her and give me her job."

"What's in it for me?" He had been staring at my legs, but when he leaned to look up my shirtdress, I pushed his chair sideways with my foot as if flushing a public toilet. He barely caught himself. I stretched my lips around to display my whole set of teeth and growled.

Boone clutched his bottle to his stomach. "Are you threatening me, babe?" We stared at each other until he looked away. After taking another drink he stood, adjusted his suspenders, and studied me as though I were a prize beef heifer. "I've always had blondes," he said, lighting a cigarette. "But I can see you're wellmuscled. If we put you in a bikini get up, guys might even pay to see you twice."

The signs advertising my act are absurd. They announce that I was retrieved from "Nairobi in South Africa." The blond hair on the old posters has been darkened. A picture labeled "The Experiment" shows me spreadeagle on a bed wearing electrodes, a geeky white scientist leaning over me. In the next frame, a gorilla stands with broken restraints dangling from its wrists. The scientist lies crumpled. It reads, "Something Terrible Happened."

This job gives me mornings free, so I work out, lifting weights with the guys who run the games of chance. Boone owns my favorite videos, which I watch in his trailer.

At night I wander the 4H barns, admiring insect collections and scaring ponies, and if I see a fat grasshopper I snap it into my mouth. Lately I have been paying one of the concessions women to braid my hair into thirty snakelike braids. Boone takes care of the money and arranges the gigs, and George, who wears the gorilla suit, handles the production. And every halfhour, noon to midnight, on cue, I wind my rage into a Page 29

tighter and tighter ball behind my navel. When the pressure becomes too great, this ball explodes. The gates to the walled continent burst open, and the beast emerges.

Were the projector to switch off and the lights to click on, the audience would see a metamorphosis more shocking than they could imagine. My heartshaped face sprouts hair, my skin darkens as though burned, male sex parts burst from my groin to complement my female ones, and my breasts harden into a muscular, leathery plate. The air becomes crisp, and every person in the tent feels connected to my Middle West gorilla, my madamorous crusher of households, my rampager of tidy rose gardens. Occasionally a woman rattles with laughter or else sobs in the dark—she has recognized, in my form, the monster of her own wasted strength.

Unlike my junky blond predecessor, I perform with eyes open. I search every audience for a gaze that doesn't shy from mine. I long for a whiff of animal yeast, a wildness outside myself—a mate, perhaps. I can hold the gorilla form for only a few seconds, and then I collapse. George enters my cage through the side, knocks down the barred door, and bursts into the audience. The spell is broken, and the audience is free to pretend the show is a hoax. As audience members shriek and stampede from the tent, I lie panting, exhausted and free of anger, alone for now, in the quiet eye of the carnival.

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Old Dogs

A hunter's moon watches over celery fields twenty years fallow. Wind from across the fields tears the last leaves off a front yard maple and rails against an asbestosshingled house built on a concrete slab. Inside, three women whose long hair has turned all shades of gray lie on comingunstuffed couches before a wood burning stove. As the season necessitates, the women have swathed themselves in sweaters and sweatshirts, no longer taking care to wear the cleanest ones on top. Overfilled ash trays sit beside each woman, and empty halfgallon vodka bottles litter the room. The three cola bottles will be walked to town tomorrow for the dime deposit.

Two dogs are curled on the walllength couch between two of the women, a third dog lies with Margrite on the smaller couch, and a fourth dog lies on a sweatshirt on the floor. Margrite hasn't ordered their number two oil yet, so the wood in the dwindling pile beside the back door provides their heat. Only one of the two bulbs in the overhead fixture glows; it has been glowing dimly for twenty years, while the other, when replaced, burns brightly and burns out in a few months.

Beneath the blankets, sweaters, and sweatpants, the women are thin, surprisingly so, considering that all of them battled extra weight for decades after they had children. The dogs, despite heart

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worms and fleas, are fat. Because the two bedrooms are cold, the women have taken to sleeping on these couches, falling quiet sometime after the sun sets and waking at the light of a sunrise fogged by the plastic Margrite stapled over the outside of the windows.

The other two women are already asleep when Margrite pulls the chain that switches off the light.

At the end of Margrite's couch lies King Lear, a collie, the biggest and oldest of the dogs, afflicted with a mange condition which is starting to make him smell bad.

Margrite had King before either of the other women moved in with her. King has difficulty getting onto the couch now, but so far he has upheld his end of the domestic bargain—despite arthritis, he manages to get outside to relieve himself. If he stops being able to do that, he'll have to live outside, and the winter would probably kill him.

Lady Macbeth, a shiny black retriever mix, sleeps on her back on the other couch, her legs in the air. She is the cleverest of the dogs and a thief. Each morning she waits by the door to go out and make her rounds, and each noon she returns with loot. As well as her usual pizza boxes and bones left by poachers, she has brought home castiron pans, sandbox trucks, and, once, a gigantic pink bathing suit, big enough for a circus fat lady. She particularly likes shoes and occasionally has managed to get both of a pair, as she did the left and right beaded mocassins Margrite wears now. Lady's ancestors retrieved ducks for English aristocrats, so she has inherited the inclination not to puncture her finds. The time she dragged home a fivepound bag of dog food, she waited while Margrite opened it for her. Years ago an old friend brought Lady to Margrite, asked her if she would watch the dog for a few days. Margrite hasn't seen the old friend since.

Juliet, lying still beside Lady with her nose buried in blankets, might be the ugliest dog in the neighborhood. Somebody dropped her off as a puppy at the end of the road, and a neighbor girl took her home. The girl didn't care about Juliet's harelip and disproportionately short legs. Over the next few weeks, the harelip grew and the big head grew, and the legs stayed short. The dog's wiry hair clogged the girl's mother's vacuum cleaner, and the woman just couldn't stand the way the dog stared back at her, that guilty ex

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pression, then as now, a constant apology for her deformities. The neighbor girl, who had never before spoken to Margrite, showed up in tears at her door, begging Margrite to adopt the dog because her mother was taking it to animal control. The neighbor girl promised to visit and take care of the dog, but she'd only come once.

That family later bought a cocker spaniel, which bit the girl.

Margrite awakens from her halfsleep coughing. At first she chokes quietly, but soon her chest and stomach convulse. She folds her body around her heaving lungs and around her raw, terrible throat. The other women awaken and shift, but they stifle their own coughs and breathe quietly as Margrite gags into her knees. Her left hand clutches the couch arm, and she presses her eyes shut. The other women's eyes glisten in the firelight. The dogs lift their ears and stare, their eyes glassy and alert.

Margrite feels for her drink glass on the floor and swallows what's left, and although tears stream down her face and her hands shake, she sits very still and wills her cough to subside.

Hamlet, the best watchdog, has only three legs now. The fourth got caught at the knee in a fox trap two summers ago. When the trapper, a thirdshift paper mill worker, checked his traps a couple days later, he considered shooting the dog, whose tibia and fibula had been snapped clean by the force of the trap jaws. He would have shot the dog, a lab mix with blue merle colors, if it had looked up at him and whimpered. But, once freed, the dog limped away without looking back, and the man figured he'd let the creature die in peace. Hamlet bled in the woods near the river for days, licking himself and dragging the halfattached leg from place to place.

He finally caught the leg on some barbed wire and tore it the rest of the way off. He returned home across the celery field, thin and feverish, in order to heal or die. He licked his stump night and day, licked the busted bone and wound in a constant rhythm, never sleeping, working as though his infection produced an addictive liquor.

Though the stump has healed over, Hamlet has never stopped his vigil. All night, while the rest of the house sleeps, he licks the leg and his whole body in a continuous act of selfhealing. He has long been able to stand and walk, but is unable to climb onto the high couches and so must accept the false humility of sleeping on the Page 33

floor. Cushioned from the cold concrete by only a wafer of carpeting and whatever blankets or clothing fails to the floor, Hamlet remains alert long after people and other dogs are insensible.

Hamlet stops licking himself to watch Margrite light a cigarette and suck in a long draw. Hamlet watches her smoke the cigarette all the way down and then toss the filter into the fire. He watches her feed the fire another log from the stack drying beside the stove. He watches her gray head fall quiet against the couch arm with her mouth hanging open.

Hamlet smells the women's sweat and the sharp medicine from the bottom of glasses and bottles. He smells the cigarette tar on the women's breath as they exhale, and something of rotting meat, as well. He inhales the death smell of King's mangeridden skin, and he resumes licking his own mottled coat.