Women and Other Animals Part 2

"Just to hara.s.s her."

"You got anything to eat?" Bess asked.

"I've got a SuzyQ. You should've asked me to stop at the gas station."

"I don't get paid for two weeks. I wondered if you'd float me a loan."

"Tuition was due this week so twentytwo bucks has got to last me five days, and I got to get gas and cigarettes."

"Well, give me half that SuzyQ and a cigarette, Brother. I promise I'll make it up to you. How was your hot date anyway?"

Hal tore open the package with his teeth and unwrapped the pair of cakes. "Bess," he said, holding one out to her, "I've been meaning to tell you something." He rolled the cellophane into a ball and crunched it in his hand. Usually by now he would have turned on the television or stereo or both.

"What?" asked Bess. "Just tell me."

"My date wasn't with a girl."

"What? You decided she was a real dog?"

"Listen, Bess," Hal paused. "I just might be gay."

"Huh?"

"Gay, like, you know, queer. I don't know." Hall was going on in a normal voice, as though he was at the StopnGas giving directions to the highway doughnut shop, as though he wasn't talking about ruining his entire life. Bess felt the furniture and posters of Metal Page 37 lica and Def Leppard grow large, then small, and then far away. Hal cleared his throat. "I never said anything to you, but I've been wondering for a while. And there's this guy from my algebra cla.s.s."

"Stop!" said Bess. "Don't tell me any more."

"Why not?"

"Aw, s.h.i.+t, Hal, why do we all have to be so screwed up?"

"See, that's why I didn't tell you before," said Hal. "This does not make me screwed up, Bess."

"No, you're perfectly normal. And so was Mom. And Aunt Victoria. d.a.m.n it." Without realizing it, she had eaten the entire creamfilled cake. She looked down at her empty hand.

During her eighthour s.h.i.+ft the next night, Bess tried to ignore the smell of popcorn and melted b.u.t.ter from the Westland 4 Theater, but her stomach growled the whole time. Bess had felt hungry since she could remember, an endless, gnawing, empty feeling stretching in all directions. She leaned against the gla.s.s door, careful not to push the handle. A sign read: "Use other exits after 6:00 P.M." The north parking lot spread out before her, s.p.a.ces for three hundred cars and n.o.body there. What about that succession of community college girls Hal had dragged around, one after another? Didn't they mean anything to him? Bess turned and walked back toward the theater. This used to be a popular shopping center, but now it was run down and half the stores had forrent signs in their windows. New malls on the south side of town had pulled away the business. She shone her flashlight through the window of the Navy recruiting office. On the way into work, she had introduced herself to the officer in charge, a small solid man in uniform. One poster inside featured a ma.s.sive gray battles.h.i.+p plunging through the ocean, cutting a track through the waves. On another, a group of uniformed, whitegloved men and women stood in sharp rows on the deck of an aircraft carrier. Each time she pa.s.sed the recruiting office she straightened her shoulders.

When her mother died of lymphoid cancer almost seven years ago, Bess had somehow figured that a welldressed man with a beautiful house would show up and say he was their father and take them home, but there was only the big, quiet woman who'd lived Page 38 with them and slept with their mother. Every weekday morning of that first year without Mom, Aunt Victoria had grimly watched Bess cross the tracks and cross M98 to get to the bus stop. Then Victoria stood there on the porch with her arms crossed until the bus came. Victoria's solemn expression had scared Bess, and Bess avoided looking back at her. Until that year, Hal had been a constant close presence, almost a twin, but he'd gone ahead of Bess to middle school.

The last movie in the Westland 4 Theater let out at 10:47, and the scattering of patrons left the building through the proper exits, without incident. Hal was waiting for Bess outside, but they didn't speak until they were nearly home. "Have you done it with a guy?" Bess asked, as they climbed the little hill.

"Not yet. No." The Omni rattled over the tracks.

"So how do you know you're gay?"

"I just feel like I am."

"Why, Hal?" she pleaded. "Why do you have to do this?"

"I don't know, Bess. Get used to it." Hal slammed the Omni door, took the porch stairs two at a time, and didn't hold the screen door for her. Bess paused outside to look down the tracks, to listen for a train whistle, a sound with no uncertainty, but she heard only the creaking of the porch boards. Bess had always wanted their lives to be simpler, and now Hal was moving in the exact opposite direction. Didn't he realize he was giving up the chance to be normal? And didn't he realize that he could end up as awful and miserable as Victoria?

As Bess pa.s.sed through the bluelit living room, she heard the purr of the vibrating Naugahyde chair in which Aunt Victoria was sleeping. Sometimes she spent the whole night in it. Bess stood silent, lulled by the chair's hum, and she wondered why her mother had died instead of Victoria. Her mother had enjoyed life, was always laughing and showing those big teeth like Hal's. Even back then Victoria never laughed-she had just watched Bess's mother and waited for her next cue, as though nothing mattered but pleasing her. Bess longed to hear her mother's loud, clear voice, to ride in the pa.s.senger's seat of the car while her mother drove, to sit with her on the couch under that needlepoint picture of Jesus, doing a Page 39 thousandpiece jigsaw puzzle of a sky full of orange b.u.t.terflies. The vinyl couch was torn, the s.h.a.g rug matted and sticky. Aunt Victoria was a fat monster, turning to liquid in her vibrating recliner, and Hal was queer. How could you have let this happen? she silently asked the needlepoint Jesus, which was now so dusty you couldn't tell who it was. "Why?"

"I miss her too," said Victoria quietly in her rumbling stomach voice.

Bess hadn't realized she had spoken the last word aloud. She stood frozen.

"I told your mother I wanted to die with her." Victoria's watery eyes reflected blue from the television. "But she wouldn't let me."

"Oh." Bess's heart pounded fearfully.

"You need something to eat?" Victoria asked, her voice strange and soft. Victoria hadn't offered her anything to eat in years. Victoria just left food in the kitchen, and Bess either ate it or didn't.

"No." Bess wanted to run upstairs and hide her face in her own pillows. Instead she ascended slowly.

The third night after work, Hal didn't show up. Bess could've tried him at home, but she decided to walk rather than risk getting Victoria on the phone. She didn't want Victoria to offer to come get her, because it was a long process for Victoria to get dressed and out to her car, and then what would she and Bess talk about for twenty minutes on the way home? Over the last year, since Victoria and Hal had been fighting, Bess had gotten to feel that any unnecessary communication with Victoria was a betrayal of Hal. Victoria and Hal had always argued, but they had practically been enemies since a year ago when Hal tried to get into her personal food cupboard with a screwdriver. He'd been smoking pot, and the metal was heavy gauge, so he hadn't done much damage by the time Victoria came home. She'd screamed at him, that he was an ungrateful b.a.s.t.a.r.d, that he had no respect. Hal had said calmly, "What are you going to do, sit on me?" and Victoria had erupted in a frenzy and thrown all the spoons and forks from the silverware drawer, sending Hal running outside into the driveway. The following day, Hal had taken the mashed potatoes from leftover dinners in the refrigerator Page 40 and shaped ridges into the letters d.y.k.e on the counter beside the sink.

Victoria was halfowner and head cook at the Michigan Waffle House on Red Arrow Highway, and Bess used to eat what Victoria brought home-meatloaf slices and chickenfried steaks arranged on plates with mashed potatoes and a dab of overcooked vegetables. Ever since Hal had been about fifteen, he'd lived mostly on junk food and liked it, but Bess always craved meals. As Bess watched Victoria get fatter, however, Bess felt worse and worse about eating those Waffle House specials. Bess took to standing at the kitchen counter and eating the food from the takeaway containers as quickly as she could, but after the mashed potato business, Bess just couldn't let herself anymore. Finally she'd left so many plates untouched, with the food beginning to mold beneath the plastic wrap, that Victoria quit bringing them, and now she only brought home loaves of white bread and hunks of sandwich meat or sometimes uncut American cheese.

Because there was no sidewalk, Bess tramped across the edges of the wellkept west side lawns, punctuated by streetlights every hundred yards. Before Hal had gotten a car, they used to slip out on warm June nights like this and prowl their towns.h.i.+p. They sat on the bench nearest the pond, smoking and tossing rocks into the water. They'd talked about missing their mom and about how bad Victoria was in comparison. Bess had always been more afraid of Victoria than hateful, and she wondered if Hal had really felt the hate he expressed back then. Bess wondered if she knew Hal at all. Were they ever as close as she thought they'd been?

After she'd walked about two miles, a red Camaro pulled alongside her. "Hey, baby, you need a ride?" the young driver yelled out the window. Bess put her hat back on her head and peered in.

"Um, uh," the guy stammered. "Excuse me, Officer."

"Jimmy Jukes? Is that you?" she asked. "It's Bess, from shop cla.s.s. I helped you build your mom a bookshelf. What are you doing here?"

"Are you a cop now?" he asked.

"Security guard. My ride didn't pick me up. Can you give me a lift?"

Page 41 "Sure." He had a wellfed look, plump arms, a nice hank of whiteblond hair.

She lowered herself into the car, whose pa.s.senger seat tilted so far back she could barely see over the dashboard. The front of the car seemed to protrude from their hips. Operating the vehicle and flipping the radio stations absorbed Jimmy entirely as they raced through downtown, past the factories, through their towns.h.i.+p. The car effortlessly climbed the hill to Bess's house. Hal's Omni wasn't there.

"How can you live right on the tracks?" asked Jimmy. "Don't you get woken up by the trains?"

"I like train whistles."

"Last summer I took a train to Chicago," Jimmy said. "Me and my more and my little sister went to the museums."

"What museums?" Bess turned to him.

"Science Museum, Natural History Museum, Aquarium, Planetarium," said Jimmy. "We slept downtown in a hotel, the Palmer House."

Bess imagined herself and Jimmy walking along a boulevard lined with museums, skysc.r.a.pers, and hotels. They'd share the sidewalk with people traveling briskly from their jobs to their homes, neatly dressed, confident that their lives made sense. Those people rode subways and read newspapers along the way, and they arranged their apartments with only a few pieces of simple, attractive, durable furniture. She'd never been to Chicago, but she knew Lake Michigan must glitter in every backdrop, decorated with sailboats and military s.h.i.+ps. She leaned toward Jimmy and pressed her lips to his. Jimmy wrapped both arms around her and bent her against the pa.s.sengerside door, ending on his knees. He kissed with a stiff tongue and sloppy lips. Bess and Hal had taught each other to kiss when they were eleven and twelve. Remembering it now, Bess felt ashamed. She pulled away and mumbled the first part of thanksfortheride, but before she finished Jimmy said, "Oh, yeah," and lunged across the seat for her again. Bess had been reaching for the door handle and the door sprang open. Her upper body fell outside, Jimmy on top of her, kissing toward her neck.

Page 42 "Hey!" she shouted. "Cut it out. Let me straighten up."

"Sorry, man." When she sat back up, he put an arm over her shoulders, apparently content just to sit with her. She pulled the door closed. Where was Hal? The house looked emptier and dingier than usual. The fakebrick tarpaper had torn above Aunt Victoria's window and next to the porch door. Bess's mom used to enjoy working on the house, and Victoria had fetched tools for her and held window trim in place while Bess's mom nailed. Her mom used to plant flowers along the foundation in summer. n.o.body had wielded a hammer or garden trowel in years.

Jimmy wasn't a badlooking guy, and he did have this nice car. Bess leaned into him and kissed him, and again he jabbed his tongue toward the back of her throat.

Maybe she wasn't going to like kissing men. Bess had kissed a few guys around school, and she especially had liked pressing against Derek Hill under the stairs last year, but Hal said he wasn't good enough for her, and anyway that memory felt distant and uncertain. Maybe she would end up like her mother, sharing a bed with some woman. Bess didn't want to face a life of being different, of being a lesbian. She felt the claustrophobic softness of that word pressing against her like another woman's b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

"Jimmy, have you ever had s.e.x in this car?" she asked.

"Huh?"

"I mean, how could you with those bucket seats?" She hoped she was giving the impression she'd done this before. In fact, the few times she'd come close, either Hal had shown up, or she'd stopped herself by thinking about what Hal would say. How could it have been such a short time ago that Hal was always near her?

"Maybe the bback?" suggested Jimmy.

"It's too small." Bess gestured at the abbreviated back seat. The house was out of the question because they'd have to pa.s.s Victoria in her chain And anyway, Bess liked her bedroom to be all her own, and she didn't want anybody else in it, not even Hal, who made fun of her neatly made bed and carefully arranged and dusted dresser top. "Maybe on the hood there." She stepped around the wide door and sat herself on the car, facing the house, her back to the tracks. ''This'll work," she said.

Page 43 Jimmy got out and walked around to where she sat. "Here on the car?" he asked. "You want to do it here? With me?"

"Sure. Why not?"

"Cool." Jimmy was just about her height. He reached under her s.h.i.+rt, and stroked her b.r.e.a.s.t.s through her bra like a couple of puppies.

Bess found the sensation annoying, and after she unb.u.t.toned her uniform s.h.i.+rt and unhooked her bra, it still didn't feel right. She pushed his hands around behind her, closed her eyes, and pretended she was with Derek under the stairs. Victoria's bedroom light switched on and then went out. Bess wrapped her legs around Jimmy and pulled him toward her. She wished Hal would pull into the driveway, even though she knew her future as a normal girl depended on going all the way. "You got a condom?" she asked.

"Yeah. Maybe." Jimmy opened the pa.s.senger door, and fumbled in the glove compartment while Bess unbuckled her belt and removed her shoes, pants, and panties, then perched on the hood again. Residual engine heat warmed her naked bottom. Jimmy managed to produce a condom, which he held between two fingers, away from himself. He stared at Bess's pubic hair openmouthed. Bess grabbed the condom and tore the plastic package with her teeth.

"Come on," said Bess. "Let's hurry." She reached to unzip him.

"I have to go," he said.

"What do you mean, you have to go?"

"Um, this is my brother's car," he said. "I took it without permission." Jimmy walked around to the driver's side and got in like a robot.

"You're going to leave?" Bess asked. "Right now, you're going to leave?" She slid off the car, disentangled her underwear from the pile of clothes and pulled them on.

She picked up her pants and shoes in one hand, while in the other she still held the condom. Before he closed his door, Bess glimpsed him in the dash light. His face was round and so soft he probably had never shaved. "Let's go get something to eat,'' she suggested through the window.

He revved the engine of the Camaro. "I have to go. I'll see you around." As he backed out of the driveway, Bess tossed the condom Page 44 after him like a little frisbee it bounced off the car's b.u.mper and landed in the dirt. Jimmy screeched away over the tracks.

Bess dressed and dragged herself up the porch stairs and into the kitchen where she spread margarine across two slices of stale bread from a big restaurant loaf. She wrapped the bread around the last chunk of uncut bologna and leaned against the sink to eat, staring at Victoria's metal cupboard. The strange, sad way Victoria had talked last night made Bess think that all she'd have to do was ask and Victoria would open this cupboard and give her whatever food was in there. Bess felt relieved that Jimmy had taken off, but she knew she was going to have to do it sometime with some guy. Hal always said she should wait because the first time should be special. He'd done it with three girls, as far as Bess knew, but apparently none of them had been special enough.

Bess woke at ten the next morning to discover Hal still wasn't back. On Sat.u.r.days, Aunt Victoria was at the Waffle House until noon. Bess wandered outside, climbed up onto the tracks, and looked in both directions along the corridor of steel, stones, and railroad ties. Chicago was 150 miles west, and Detroit was the same distance to the east. Those were places where things happened, places to which people rode trains. Hal always said Chicago didn't have anything that mattered. The Sears Tower is there, Bess had said, and Hal said the Sears Tower was just another tall building. In the direction of Detroit, Bess spotted a brown bag, probably tossed from a pa.s.sing car. She opened it to find six returnable Natural Lite cans. She balanced atop a straight, s.h.i.+ning rail past the scrubby line of sumac and p.r.i.c.ker bushes-just beyond which was hidden Hal's marijuana patch-past the septictank pumping company, past the gravel pit. Beyond that were two junkyards and the shredder where people sold truckloads of sc.r.a.p metal. By then she'd found eight more tencent bottles.

She tightropewalked back toward the towns.h.i.+p center, past her house, to the Beer Store, where she traded the cans for a singleserving carton of milk and an individual packet of cheese and cracker sticks. A car honked she didn't recognize the driver, but in case he was honking at her, she waved back to let him know she Page 45 liked guys. On the other side of the tracks, she stopped at the little pond where she and Hal used to sit when they snuck out at night. She thought of throwing her three pennies change into the water, but as she listened to the approaching whistle of a freight train, she changed her mind. She placed the pennies side by side on one rail and ran to safety. As she waited alongside, she saw, for just an instant, the engineer in a John Deere cap and wireframed gla.s.ses shake his finger at her, scolding.

Bess counted fortyseven boxcars and no caboose, and afterwards she searched the tracks and found one of the pennies, still warm from the violence. She closed her hand around the coin and noticed that her fingernails were short and ragged-she must have chewed them in her sleep again last night. She didn't see either of the other pennies. Sometimes they were thrown clear or pulverized. Once home, she went upstairs and emptied a tin box of flattened pennies onto her dresser. She hadn't added to the collection in years. Her mother had shown her how to place them on the tracks when she was only five or six and had helped her find them afterwards.

Where had Victoria been? Bess wondered. Had she watched them from a safe place? Each of those old pennies was waferthin with only a ghost of Lincoln's head on one side and the Lincoln Memorial on the other. In a split second each had suffered a century's worth of wear. Each coin represented a hundredton train speeding past, imparting a bit of energy and leaving Bess behind.

Bess sat on the porch to eat her crackers. Over the tracks she could see the tops of cars pa.s.sing on M98, and she saw right into the cab of a semitruck, saw a man's fat belly pus.h.i.+ng against a bright red Ts.h.i.+rt. In a flash he was gone. He was probably hauling that trailer from some other part of the country, the South maybe, or New England. Years ago, Bess and Hal used to pull down their pants and moon the pa.s.sing Amtraks from this porch, then practically fall down laughing at the shock on the pa.s.sengers' faces. All her life Bess had felt as though she was going to burst-out of her clothing, out of her desk at school, out of this town, out of her own skin. Maybe Victoria had felt this way once too, but instead she just swelled and stretched.

Finally she heard the sputtering of the Omni, climbing up and Page 46 over the tracks, threatening to stall, then regaining its power at the top. Hal parked in his usual spot, close to the house. He jingled his keys as he sauntered up and stood before her, grinning, eyes bright. "Hi, Bess."

"Thanks a lot for picking me up from work last night."

"Oh, no, Bess. I'm sorry. I totally forgot."

"No s.h.i.+t." She stood up and went into the kitchen, letting the screen door snap behind her. Hal followed, closing the door carefully, and she felt his eyes on her back as she wiped margarine across a piece of bread. She tipped back her head to hold in the tears, and Hal reached around and handed her a lit cigarette. She took a long draw and released it. When she turned, Hal was still smiling as though he were the towns.h.i.+p idiot.

"What's that on your neck?" asked Bess.

"What?" Hal felt his neck with his hand.

"It's a hickey," she said, leaning closer. "You got a G.o.dd.a.m.n hickey."

Hal ran his fingers over his neck. Bess imagined the redbellied truck driver kissing Hal's neck. She saw the scolding, wirerimmed engineer with his greencapped head curled on Hal's chest. Bess stuffed some bread into her mouth. "Aren't you hungry?" she asked.

"Someone took me out to breakfast," said Hal.

"Someone a man?"

"Yes."

"So what did you have?"

Hal rolled his eyes, but then complied, counting the items on his fingers. "Scrambled eggs, bacon and sausage, toast, and hash browns."

"Were the eggs fluffy?" she asked.

"Sure, I guess."

"Link sausages or patties?"

"Links."

"Figures." She drew on her cigarette. "Smoky flavored?"

"Kind of smoky." He shrugged.

"I went out with a guy last night, too," said Bess. "He had a Camaro." Her vision blurred. She wasn't ready for Hal to leave her, not for a man or anybody.

Page 47 The clock read 12:10, time for the westbound noon train, and neither spoke while the whistle sounded. They felt the usual rumbling in the floor. Hal would make a life for himself, thought Bess, and looking into those bright, laughing eyes, she knew it wouldn't be a sad life like Victoria's. Maybe it would be complicated, but it would be like their mother's life, full of love and fun. Bess didn't know why the thought made her want to cry. Her left hand went slack, and she dropped her halfslice of bread. Just about the time it hit the linoleum, a crash like a dull gray battles.h.i.+p shook their house metal screamed and tore and gave way in the distance. Hal glanced at his watch, then back at Bess. The two stood dumb, sharing the same thought: Aunt Victoria was returning from work. Bess imagined Victoria's car wrenched in two, her gelatinous body ripped to bits across the tracks, b.l.o.o.d.y jowls and b.u.t.t cheeks spread all over the towns.h.i.+p. They tore outside to see Aunt Victoria pulling safely into the driveway in her modified white Ford. The car tilted toward the driver's side and nearly lifted off the ground on the other. The driver's seat had been moved back to accommodate her size. Bess and Hal watched Victoria extricate herself from behind the steering wheel, her head still attached to her body. The car sprang miraculously to a level position.

"She must've gotten new shocks," whispered Hal.

"What the h.e.l.l are you staring at?" Victoria growled.

"What do you think?" said Hal.