Women & Other Animals (19 page)

Andy had left some kind of caramel pastry here. Georgina pulled the box toward herself across the table until she could see through the plastic window. She didn't care what Andy ate during the day. Let him eat his deepfried doughnuts and vending machine cashews. Let him pour mapleflavored corn syrup over his fucking Greek restaurant breakfast sausages. But he didn't have to bring this shit into the house to tempt her.

"Thank you, sir. I appreciate it," she said. According to the cop's directions, Andy's truck probably wasn't more than a halfmile from the house where Georgina had lived until she was fifteen. The old neighborhood had been run down, and the road along the river had always been littered with trash despite "No Dumping" signs.

Kids there, including Georgina, had earned nickels from the bait shop by digging nightcrawlers out of the soft muck.

Georgina hung up the phone and resisted an urge to take out her file and further clean and smooth her nails. She had been planning to get her hair trimmed today, to buy a red blazer, and to visit her sisterinlaw who wanted her to host a party to sell candles or lingerie or some shit. She thought about pretending she'd never gotten that call about the truck, but she'd become curious about the old neighborhood, and besides she'd like to see just how stuck Andy had gotten himself. Andy had eaten a corner piece out of the pastry, a rectangle no bigger than a foldedup paycheck. Why would a person who was going to eat only that much buy a whole goddamn box?

Georgina hadn't eaten pastry in years. Dieting had changed her body into an efficient machine, one which needed surprisingly few calories to sustain itself. When she had originally cut her rations, her stomach radioed her primitive brain—the oldest, grayest part, at the base of her skull—and sent the message that she was a woman lost from her tribe, banished from her native lands, scavenging on hillsides in years of drought, scratching for the sustenance of wildflower seeds, berries, and weed roots.

With the handle of her cereal spoon, she cut a piece of pastry about the same size as the missing piece. She held it between two fingers and moved it toward her mouth and almost bit down, but instead she

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returned it to the box and wiped her hands on her jeans. Stop it, she told herself. But she wondered if biting into that sweet stuff would open up an alternative universe, one she'd entirely forgotten. Maybe it would be a universe of surrender. Vegetables and rice cakes never surrendered. Cheerios always stood up to her in the white china bowl, which sat before her now looking very empty, as though it had never contained cereal or anything. She rinsed the bowl and the spoon and put them both in the drainer. Eat me, the pastry cried from the table, bite me, as boys used to say in the neighborhood.

She could probably eat more if she exercised, but she couldn't imagine herself bouncing around the way women did. Maybe martial arts. Gardening would have worked, but Andy didn't want her tearing up any part of the lawn. He claimed it would interfere with his underground sprinkler system. She went into the attached garage and started up her Volkswagen Golf. Georgina had thought she, not Andy, would be the first to get a new vehicle, since hers was ten years old with some rust on the rear body panels, and yet, something stopped her from giving up a car that still ran well. In another year or two, her car would look at home in the old neighborhood, parked in a dirt driveway, next to a sagging front porch on which an unshaven man in a sleeveless undershirt lounged on a torn and disheveled couch.

As she backed into the street, away from her vinylsided, whitetrimmed white house, the perfect blackness of tarred and curbed driveway poured out in front of her.

Covering the land between house and driveway was Andy's sacred green, uninterrupted by bush, flower, or weed. The garage door rolled toward the ground. From somewhere out of sight Georgina heard the buzz of chain saws and diesel motors; she smelled the burning oil of twostroke engines, of men clearing the way for another house like hers, of bulldozers shoving felled trees to the back of one hundredbytwo hundred foot building lots. There was so much development around here; everybody wanted to live in these gently curving rows of tidy and respectable prefabricated homes.

In a field near the river, Mexicans with machetes trudged north along the rows, the muck closing around their feet with each step so Page 128

their rubber boots became as weighted as balls and chains. The men hacked with knives as long as their forearms and tossed heads of celery, half as thick as they were high, into the wagon that rolled beside them. The sweet peppery fragrance of celery leaves and seeds poured into Georgina's car through open windows and became so strong that she had to stop and park. Her granny used to grow a patch of celery behind the barn and she'd told Georgina about the old days, when the farmers grew acres and acres of the best celery in the world right here. Georgina wished Granny could see this. Along with the other old neighbor ladies, her granny had worked most of her springs planting seeds, and her summers placing bleachboards against each plant to block the sun and make the celery grow anemic pale, the way people liked it in New York and Chicago. The blackhaired men in boots, jeans, and straw cowboy hats moved steadily away, abreast one another, shouting in Spanish, slashing and tossing, synchronized in a harvest line dance.

When Georgina no longer could hear the men's voices or make out their hands and necks, she shifted into first. For half a mile, celery heads grew on either side of the road, green columns which, after all these years, had somehow thrust upward from their roots with enough force to displace the heavy soil. After her granny died, Georgina, who was ten, had asked her mother why nobody grew celery anymore. Georgina's mother told her that the soil was finally used up, once and for all, and that was why the fields lay weedy and uncultivated, including the little garden plot behind their barn.

The houses beyond the fields were exactly as Georgina remembered—simple, small, peelingpaint houses built on concrete block foundations or on slabs poured atop mounds of slag landfill, above yards low enough to flood after a big rain. Georgina slowed to pass a driveway where four children with dirtsmeared legs played a game of running and handslapping. Even with Andy's sprinkler system and fertilizer, her new west side lawn didn't stay lush like these yards, fed by a watertable not more than a foot below the surface. That watertable explained everything about this place, why the celery grew, why the earth used to heave behind her old house, where one month there might be a valley a foot deep and the next month there'd be a little hill, and why Andy's truck, when she Page 129

reached it, was mired nearly to its axles. If he couldn't live without the new truck as he'd insisted, then why had he risked the thing by coming to the river, of all places, to get firewood? Andy's truck was as white as a wedding cake, a pure color that seemed wrong here. She'd expect greenwhites like the celery her granny once protected from the sun, and she'd expect redwhites like the crazy eyes of that pony that had been trapped in the mud a decade ago.

God, she hadn't thought of that pony in ages. As a kid, Georgina had seen cars stuck when older kids unfamiliar with the area would park and make out, and then they'd have to call their parents or a tow truck to winch them. The girl who lived up on the ridge must have known she was pushing her luck riding her pony into that part of the woods after spring rains. When Georgina and other kids on the street heard the commotion, they came tearing through their patched screen doors and out of their weedy backyards. The pony, purplybrown and sweating, had sunk past its knees. It screamed and tossed its neck in the air as if trying to throw off its head.

Its eyes rolled back in its sockets and grasscolored foam poured out of its mouth and coated the leather bridle and reins which whipped around like swamp snakes.

Though visions of the pony used to keep her awake nights, she had managed not to think of the animal since she'd moved with her mom out of the neighborhood. If they'd given Georgina a chance, she might have been able to free that pony, but back then she hadn't done anything but watch it thrash and listen to its screams, halfanimal, halfmachine. The girl had run up the ridge in her cowboy boots and leather fringe and returned with her father who dangled a shotgun. He made the girl stand back as he raised the gun to his shoulder. "No, Daddy! No!" screamed the girl. Georgina woke into the nightmare that the man wasn't even trying to save the creature, and that people up the ridge were cruel and stupid. The girl in fringe covered her eyes, and Georgina watched the ashfaced hill farmer buck at the force with which the shot left the gun. Later he and some other men shoveled a mound of dirt over the pony. A year later the ground was level again.

Undoubtedly the animal had gone a little mad—but what greater madness drove that man to bring his gun down the hill? Was it the Page 130

same thing that made Andy drive his thirtyfive thousand dollar truck into the mud? Nights after the hill farmer shot the pony, Georgina had devised plans for pulling it out alive, using ropes and winches, blockandtackles, devices which could lift that pony straight into the air, maybe in a hammock made of her bed sheets. The muck would have released the pony if they'd worked it. Why had the man been so anxious to sacrifice the creature that he didn't even ask the river people for help?

Georgina pulled off the road alongside a drainage ditch and the car tilted sideways. She wished she had brought Andy's pastry and given it to the dirty children back there—if they were like her, they'd have torn it apart with their hands and chewed it with their mouths open as they shouted to one another. When she got out of the car, she saw that if she'd pulled a few inches farther off the road, the car might have fallen into the ditch. She crossed the road toward the woods and the truck. If this were March instead of September, the rigid, spiked cradles of skunk cabbage flowers would be poking up from the mud. Were this May, the leaves of the skunk cabbage would have unfurled as fresh and green as that celery. Georgina used to bend down and smell the skunk cabbage each spring, and now she remembered it like the stink of her own sweat before she'd ever used deodorant. In the summer she had roamed the cool woods, gnawing wild onion and the roots of wild ginger.

Andy's double rear tires had crushed a stand of jewel weed blossoming at the edge of the road. If this were late September instead of late August, she would touch the orange pods of the jewel weed, and they would explode against her fingers. In addition to celery, Georgina's granny used to grow tomatoes, cucumbers, and muskmelons in the black dirt behind their old house.

Fourwheel drive had apparently done Andy no good with all four wheels buried. Maybe that's why the cops called the house—if the truck had been easy to tow, somebody would have towed it already. Andy deserved to be stuck if he was here trying to steal from somebody else's land; he deserved to be stuck for thinking these people wouldn't stop him from taking their wood. And yet Georgina couldn't help but think she should at least try to free the truck, to make up for not rescuing the pony.

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On the other side of the truck, three men stood in the driveway of an asbestosshingled house painted the color of lime sherbet. One was old and bald and smallheaded and two were about Georgina's age and wore baseball caps. Their property was built up unevenly, several feet higher at one side of the concrete block foundation. A fulllength crack in the front picture window was held steady with duct tape. Beside the driveway sat a trailer made out of the back end of a pickup, rusted and filled with split wood, one of its tires flat. Andy's truck with its clean white panels and black wheels looked like a spaceship in contrast. It had sunk low enough that Georgina hardly had to step up to get inside.

Everybody Georgina remembered from this neighborhood had been a mutant of some kind, malformed or marked, as if nature loved each so much she couldn't let him look like anybody else. Look at that old man standing in the driveway with the tiny head, hardly enough room in that head for a regular brain. Georgina's mother, a palehaired mammoth of a woman, used to have a mole on the side of her neck, a great protuberance that looked as though it might grow into a second illegitimate child, a sister for Georgina. When they'd moved away, the first thing Georgina's mother had done was get that mole removed. Delbert, a boy with whom Georgina waited for the school bus, had a raspberrycolored birthmark covering half his face. The woman next door was confined to a wheelchair; a long, unpainted ramp led to the front door, its boards coming loose, regularly stranding the woman partway so she had to holier for help from her six children. After her granny died, Georgina's whole body had become a mutation, round and soft as a tumor from eating any food she could get hold of. Without Granny's yellow cakes and date cakes cooked with coffee, Georgina spent all her nightcrawler money on creamfilled cookies and honey buns and ate them right outside the store, standing next to the electric meters. In the morning she filled her cereal bowl again and again, with sugarflavored cereal, then milk, then more cereal.

Out of habit, Georgina pulled the seat belt around her. Andy's truck, which cost more than the houses in this neighborhood, started easily with a turn of her own key, vrooming at first, then slowing and idling into a low growl. Maybe Georgina could drive to Page 132

her old house by cutting a new trail through the woods, swerving through trees along the river, then turning back south. She felt an inclination toward the old place, a pull verging on homesickness for the solid feel of its carpeted concrete floors, the lumpy and changing landscape of its backyard, her granny's garden, sodden and weedy after a night of rains—some weeds grew a foot a day in this soil, Granny had complained, mud smeared to her elbows. Some previous owner had cut away a curved doorway between their kitchen and the living room but had never smoothed it out or plastered its edges. Spiders had built webs there in the spaces between the pieces of sheetrock. Granny said spiders helped control the flies, but after her granny became too sick to argue, her mother used to spray insecticide into the cracks.