Larger Than Life (Novella) (3 page)

With my hands on my hips, I survey my tiny living space. I soak one of my T-shirts
with the water and wring it into the calf’s mouth, which works—but she knocks me over
in an effort to get more, faster. Determined, I tear apart my dresser drawers and
my closet. I find a hot water bottle and a funnel. Then I spy the rubber gloves beneath
my sink. I slip them onto my hands and scrub like I am a surgeon, trying to wash away
any residue of cleaning fluid. I slip the neck of a glove over the wine bottle.

I need a rubber band, but I don’t have one. All of the secretarial supplies are in
the office. I reach into my pocket, looking for a hair elastic, and instead touch
the telegram from this morning.

Just like that, I can’t breathe.

The calf bellows loud enough for the lights to come on in the cabin beside mine. I
freeze.

But no one comes forward from the darkness, and the only sound is the monkeys in the
trees, passing judgment. I reach into my other pocket for the hair tie and wrap it
tight around the glove to form a makeshift nipple. With a pocketknife, I punch a hole
into the tip of one of the fingers. Then I tilt the bottle upside down, so that the
calf can suckle.

She does. The sweetened water runs down her chin and her chest as she draws on the
teat of the rubber glove. I refill the bottle three times. My hands grow sticky; my
arm aches as I hold the bottle in place. The calf drinks like there’s no tomorrow.
Like I’m all she’s got.

My mother could have been a truly brilliant scientist, and she never passed up the
opportunity to tell me so. But she was also unusually beautiful, which undercut her
chances of being taken seriously as a college student in her day. Her white shoulders,
her jet-black hair, and her violet eyes called to mind a young Elizabeth Taylor, and
left her single and pregnant with the child of her very married biology professor.
She did not finish at Mount Holyoke but dropped out to have me.

I did not know this as a child, of course. When I started asking about my father,
she came home one day from work with a photograph. The man in the frame was young,
smiling, and looked nothing like me. The photo had been in her locker, she said, but
now she kept it on a shelf in the living room. It wasn’t until I was thirteen and
desperate for any clue written on the back that I slid the picture from beneath the
glass and realized it was just a head shot of a model that had come with the frame.
I confronted my mother, and that’s when she told me the truth: If not for me, her
life would have been considerably different.

For a few years, I had an almost-stepfather named Isaac. He cooked me pancakes in
the morning in the shapes of my initials, and he sat beside me at the kitchen table
when I was struggling through long division. It’s funny; in all my memories of Isaac,
it’s just the two of us, and my mother isn’t around. When he moved away to live with
his best friend, Frank, I didn’t realize it was because he’d fallen for someone my
mother could never be. But if I even hinted at missing Isaac, my mother would walk
out of the room.

After Isaac, I never saw my mother date—not in all the years I was growing up—although
there were plenty of men who flirted with her. There was Louie, who ran the meat counter
at the grocery store. There was my middle school principal, who kept suggesting I
was having adjustment issues, although I got straight A’s, simply so that my
mother would have to schedule appointments with him. I even had a high school boyfriend
who broke up with me because he said he found it too distracting that I had a hot
mom. My mother, however, never showed an iota of interest. I assume she felt betrayed
by my father, by Isaac. I would have felt sorry for her, being alone for so long,
if she hadn’t used this as yet another cross she had to bear in the long litany of
Things She Had Given Up for Me.

She took jobs far beneath her intellectual level, because she had no college degree.
She was a receptionist at a dental office, a telemarketer, a meter maid. On the other
hand, she pushed me to be the academic she had wanted to be. She was militaristic
in her overseeing of my studying. She bought me SAT prep books as Christmas gifts.
She visited colleges for me and summarily crossed them off my list if she didn’t feel
they would turn me into the groundbreaking scientist she wanted me to become. When
I was a high school junior and a local college gave me a book award for my academic
excellence, she dismissed it. She scoffed,
They’re just trying to get you to apply. They’d
kill
to have someone like you
. I reveled in the attention and her backhanded compliments—because for my mother,
that passed for affection. She claimed to only want the best for me, but what I did
was never good enough. She had not gotten the chance to live her life the way she
wanted, and so she was apparently going to live
mine
.

Vassar was one school that met her stringent requirements for excellence in academia
and my requirements for an energized, engaged student body. My mother agreed it was
a good match. I’m sure it also helped that although the school was now coed, it had
a long-standing reputation of producing powerful women graduates in the deafening
absence of men. I spent four years studying biopsychology, got perfect scores on my
GREs, and was already admitted to Harvard for a doctoral program before my graduation
day.

On the night following the ceremony, my mother came to my senior off-campus apartment
with a bottle of Dom Pérignon Oenothèque Rosé. “Do you know what this is?” she asked.

“Champagne?”

“A thousand-dollar bottle of champagne,” she corrected.

I thought of all that could be bought with a thousand dollars. “Can you return it?”
I asked.

She shook her head. “It’s priceless. Like my daughter.”

Her words were like sun on a patch of ice; I could immediately feel myself softening
at the edges. I watched her twist the wire cage at the neck of the bottle and pop
the cork, so that the pink bubbles frothed over her hand.

She poured two glasses—into juice cups, because that was all I had—and toasted me.
“You know what they say—you can always tell a Vassar girl … but you can’t tell her
much.”

I didn’t want to speak. I was afraid I’d break the spell, whatever this magic might
be. So I sipped from my glass as my mother drained hers. I could feel her eyes settling
on me, not with pride but as if she were checking me over for quality control.

“What?” I said, uncomfortable.

“I’m just wondering,” my mother said. “Why don’t you wear any makeup?”

I had seen my mother without her “face” only once—the day after Isaac left. It was
terrifying—the pale palette of her cheeks, the red gash of her mouth, the streaks
of mascara.

“Is it because you think you’re so pretty you don’t need it?” she mused. “Or is it
some kind of statement?”

I blinked at her. I didn’t wear makeup because usually I rolled out of bed ten minutes
before class, after having stayed up studying till 4:00
A.M
. I didn’t wear makeup because I’d been trained my whole life to focus on my brains
and not my looks. But maybe that had been a trap laid by my mother.

“It doesn’t matter how I look to my research subjects,” I said. At Harvard, I would
be working with monkeys. I was pretty sure I’d be the best-looking one in the lab
no matter how grungy I got.

My mother didn’t say anything. She just raised her brows, sniffed, and took another
sip of champagne.

Her criticism boiled at the back of my throat, bitter and hot, and I threw my verbal
punch blindly: “Maybe I
should
start wearing some makeup. Maybe I should have tried harder to attract some guy who
could get me knocked up,” I said. “Just like you.”

My mother stared at me for a long moment. Then she got up, carried the bottle to
the kitchen sink, and spilled the remainder down the drain. “You know,” she said,
her back to me, “this wasn’t as good as I’d hoped.”

We both knew she was not talking about the wine.

After making a nest for the elephant with one blanket and wrapping her in another,
I fall into a deep, exhausted sleep. I dream that Anya comes looking for me, to warn
me that Grant has found out about the calf and is on a rampage. He is going to tell
me that I’ve crossed a line, that I can no longer do my work here. Childishly, I close
the door and lock it, thinking that if he cannot get in to deliver the bad news, it
won’t be real.

In my dream, I hear Grant’s footsteps, heavy on the porch.

I hear him bang at the door.
Alice
, he says,
don’t be ridiculous
.

It is something my mother would say.

My eyes fly open, and I am suddenly awake. It is still pitch dark out, the moon high.
And I realize that Grant is not the source of the steady thump against my door.

I open it to find the calf on the threshold, getting ready to smack the wood with
her trunk again.

“You can’t come inside,” I say out loud. “I’m already in enough trouble.”

The calf rumbles.

“I know you’re hungry. But I can’t do anything else until it’s morning.” I lead the
baby elephant back to her nest of blankets. “Sleep tight,” I say.

I close the door softly and have not even pulled back the covers on my bed before
I hear her pounding again.

It gets cold in the bush when the sun goes down. It’s about 40 degrees Fahrenheit
right now. That’s why I’ve given the calf blankets. It’s also why I’m sleeping with
my door closed. But now I prop it open with one of my kitchen chairs. “Is that better?”
I ask. “I’m right here. You can see me.”

She tries to walk inside, but the rope keeps her from getting very far.

“Go to sleep,” I mutter.

I lie back down, shivering. For a few moments, it’s quiet. But then the calf starts
to rumble again. Louder.

I stare up at the ceiling, count to ten, and throw back the quilt. I untie the rope
and lead her inside.

Insert your own joke here, about the elephant in the room. She may be less than three
feet tall, but she does manage to knock over a lamp and a side table and to crush
a magazine rack beneath her foot as she follows me inside. I rearrange her blankets
beside my bed and let her root around in them. She tosses one into the air like a
pizza crust as I lie down again; it lands over her head and she squeals.

I pull the blanket off her, and she stares at me with what could only be seen as wonder.
I think of the concept of object permanence, how even human babies think a thing no
longer exists when they can’t see it. “There,” I say. “Better?”

She lifts her trunk and hoovers along the edge of the bed, over my ankle.

At some point, I do fall asleep again. I wake when the sun comes up, when the hornbills
start their morning gossip. For one blissful moment, I remember none of yesterday.
And then I feel it: a tug, a tickle. The calf is half-sprawled across the mattress,
sucking on my foot.