Women & Other Animals (25 page)

"Will you two shut up!" yelled Sharon. "Just shut up and drive!"

"Honey, aren't you supposed to be breathing deep or something?"

As they came into town on M98, lights hit the truck from all directions—the overhead street lights, lights from the Hot 'n' Now drivethrough and the Total gas station. Tommy made a lot of deliveries downtown, so he knew this stretch of road, knew to slow down over the first set of tracks so as not to cause Sharon any discomfort. The hospital was almost within sight. And just as naturally as night follows day, when the lights began to flash red and the gates fell across the road, Tommy pulled to a stop and shifted into neutral.

"What are you doing?" asked Bob.

"There's a train coming," said Tommy.

"You can make it," said Bob. "Go around."

"I can't take a chance like that with Sharon in here."

"Tommy, you idiot!" screamed Sharon. She opened the door and let herself slide out onto the road.

"Honey, wait!" said Bob and jumped down after her.

Sharon supported herself against the side of the truck, but when Bob stretched an arm around her, she pushed him away and headed toward the tracks. But before them all, as big as a movie screen, the locomotive engine appeared, oily black and unforgiving. It riveted them all in their places, approaching in what looked like slow motion. Tons and tons of steel, enough to mangle flesh and pulverize bones, enough to crush Tommy's truck and wrap it around him. A second engine followed the first, then a boxcar from the Chessie System with "Red + Julie" spraypainted on it. Then a hundred more.

With his automatic window button, Tommy lowered the pas

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senger side window and yelled down to them, "Get back in. We're almost there." But Bob and Sharon were arguing.

Luckily, the train kept rolling, and it didn't stop and back up the way they sometimes did. When Tommy saw the last train car, he looked behind him to see about thirtyfive vehicles spread out across four lanes. As the gates lifted, cars started honking, but he couldn't pull out because Sharon and Bob were still in the road.

Tommy put on his flashers, desperate at the prospect of somebody hitting Sharon or crashing into the back of his truck. Cars swerved around them. This wasn't how it was supposed to be, thought Tommy. He'd wanted to help Sharon, wanted to do the right thing for her.

"She's got to get in, Bob."

"I know that. We're working on it," said Bob. "Honey, you can't walk to the hospital."

The first time Bob tried to help Sharon back up into the cab, she slipped back down on him. "I hate this goddamn truck!" she yelled, punching the side of the seat. She kicked the rocker panel and then walked back and kicked the rear tire. She leaned against the rear fender like a girl on a real bad drunk and moaned as some sort of a spasm took hold of her. "God, I just want to have this baby."

"Sharon, honey, we're almost there," said Bob, "I promise it will be all right." Tommy wished he could say something to comfort Sharon, but the more he tried to think of something, the more blank his mind went. Bob finally got Sharon up inside the cab, sideways onto the seat so that her back pressed against Tommy's shoulder. Bob got in but couldn't shut the door, so they drove the rest of the way with the dome light on and the door buzzer screaming. When Sharon turned to face forward, Tommy saw tears raining down her face. He shifted gently so as not to move the shoulder that supported her. Tommy wondered if he was going to have to sleep alone for the rest of his life.

"Lay on the horn," said Bob as they pulled up to the emergency entrance. By the time Bob got Sharon out, a nurse and an orderly appeared with a wheelchair.

Evidently Bob had called ahead. Tommy tried to assist, but they didn't need him, and as Sharon rolled away, he felt himself bobbing in her wake. Her moans trailed behind her until the glass doors swung shut, and she was immediately around a

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corner and out of sight. Back in Tommy's truck, all that remained of Sharon were her fleecelined slippers, one on the seat, the other on the floor mat. Like his wife, Sharon had rejected all Tommy had to offer—she even hated his truck. Tommy thought of all the things his wife had taken when she moved away: stacks of neatly folded jeans, the couch, a plastic basket of makeup she kept in the bathroom, a brass floor lamp. It was hard to get used to the empty places where those things had been. The hood of the truck glowed shiny purple in the sodium lights of the hospital lot.

He loved its clean bed liner, the flare of the wheel wells, the toolbox stretching across the back, the tapering of the windows, the heavy smooth feel of opening and closing the tailgate. He hadn't been able to talk to anybody about his wife's leaving, but buying this truck had made him feel better. He hadn't cared how much it cost;

the payment and insurance now took most of his paycheck twice a month. And yet ever since he'd passed the Ford lot, he couldn't stop thinking about his old truck, too. After all the hours he'd spent lying underneath it, replacing the starter and the clutch and the Ujoints, he should have been happy to be rid of the clang thing.

He ought to just start up the new truck in neutral, skip first, shift from second to third to fourth, head out some dark farm road, drive past dimly lit houses, quiet barns, and acres of pumpkins lying tangled in fields. But what about poor Sharon up there, Sharon with tears pouring down her face, Sharon whose baby was about to shed her like an old skin?

Tommy leaned back against the seat and let out a breath he must have been holding for a long time. He felt raw, as if all his own outside layers had fallen away. He chose one square window on the third floor and pretended it was Sharon's room. Brushing the back of his hand across the upholstery, he thought of the perfect skin of the new baby, as soft as the velvet lining of his wife's wooden inlaid jewelry box. Sharon was probably cursing Bob and the doctor as she performed her miracle, pushing out something the color of a pumpkin, new life which would fill a small place in the world, a place where before there had been nothing.

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The Smallest Man in the World

Beauty is not a virtue. And beauty is not in the eye of the beholder. Beauty is a fact like height, or symmetry, or hair color. Understand that I am not bragging when I say I am the most beautiful woman in the bar.

Normally I can make this claim without hesitation because this is my regular bar. But tonight the circus is in town, and there are strangers here, including four showgirls at a table between me and the jukebox drinking what look like vodka tonics—tall, clear drinks with maraschino cherries.

Whenever the circus comes to the Palace, I attend, as I did tonight with my sister, who now drums her fingers on the bar beside me.

"What did you like best?" she asks.

I shrug. My sister gets annoyed when I refuse to talk, but I do not like to answer questions that I have not thought about.

"How about that rhinoceros?" she says. "It was sweating gallons out there. I'm surprised that woman didn't slide off."

"Yes."

"Why do you come here?" asks my sister, spinning around once on her barstool. "There's nothing to do." She spins again. "You should tell them to get magnetic darts or something."

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My sister always chatters this way. She is warm, communicative, and generous, and I am not—just ask any of my three exhusbands. If you want to know the other difficulties of being close to me, you will have to ask them or her, because I do not intend to enumerate my faults. My sister and I have similar green eyes, high cheekbones, and thick dark hair, and it is a puzzle why I am more beautiful than she. Perhaps it is because she has developed so many other interests. She is a social worker in a hospital, helping fifty families a day in whatever ways she can, she belongs to a softball league, and she has a husband who is crazy about her. Within a year, she will probably have her first child. I work at a hotel, where part of my job is to look good.

"If you're not going to talk to me, I'm leaving," my sister says. "I've got stuff I can do at home." She downs her cranberry juice and heads for the door.

This is a typical end to an evening we spend together. I cannot explain to her that, though I love her company, I do not want to talk. As she exits, two big men in circus coveralls enter, accompanied by the Smallest Man in the World. The big men have identical builds, but one is white with blond hair and slightly crossed eyes, and the other is black and scruffyheaded. Both give the impression that the coveralls are the only clothes they own. When they reach the bar, these two bend in unison, and the small man straightens his arms and allows himself to be lifted onto a barstool, where he stands and looks down on the bartender. To his credit, Martin the bartender does not ask for identification, but brings the small man his whiskey and soda in a professional way that does not suggest surprise that such a tiny man would want a drink, or indeed that a man would be so tiny.

As usual, I sit at the far end of the bar, on the brass and leather barstool nearest the wall so I can see everyone in the place. The wooden bar curves away from me and stretches thirty feet, halfway to the front door, and is stained a reddish color beneath layers of polyurethane. The wall opposite the bar is raw brick, lined with low wattage fixtures designed to look like gas lanterns. After working all day in bright light, I find the dimness comforting.

The Smallest Man in the World looks at the patrons one by one,

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then settles his gaze on me and nods. His hair is thinning. With a closed mouth, I smile. He holds up his drink in my direction in appreciation of my beauty, and I lift my drink in appreciation of his smallness.

I have compared beauty to height, but there is more in common between beauty and smallness: conciseness, the correct arrangement of parts in a confined area.

Space has not been wasted on the Smallest Man in the World. He is perfectly formed, with limbs, trunk, and ears all in proportion. Only at the most perfunctory glance does he look like a child, for he has a serious forehead and a square jaw. His face is slightly swollen, most likely from drinking, but his size obscures this fact.

An art teacher once showed me the trick of making a black ink drawing and then shrinking it on the copying machine—in the reduction, the flaws are less perceptible.

As appears to be the case with the Smallest Man in the World, I sometimes drink too much. When I develop that swollen look, I disguise it by loosening my hair.

Drinking is, of course, an ordinary addiction; it is not peculiar to persons who possess extreme qualities. Plenty of plain, normalsized people drink too much. Take, for instance, the sweaty man who has been coming in for the last few months with his shirt buttons more and more strained—he has the look of a person embroiled in an unpleasant divorce. That woman at the other end of the bar must be seventy, maybe with grandchildren, and she drinks to excess nightly, done up in foundation and blusher. The edge of her glass is smeared halfway around with lipstick.

My sister appears in the doorway behind the madeup old woman and makes her way along the bar to me, jangling her keys.

"I forgot that I drove you here. How are you getting home?"

"I can take a cab. Do not worry about me, little sister."

"Okay, take care of yourself. I'll see you soon." She touches my shoulder to prove her concern. My sister is a caring person, no doubt, but I get the feeling she is worried less about me than about the people around me. "Wherever I came I brought calamity," Tennyson quotes Helen of Troy. My sister knows that when I get drunk I become friendly, and she knows that men who came into the bar with perfectly nice women, or who have left women as pretty and caring as my sister at home, will risk future happiness in order to

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spend the night with me. You may consider my willingness to go home with such men reprehensible; you also may blame the Trojan War on Helen's misbehavior.

Keep in mind, though, that Helen did not herself launch a single warship or burn a single tower. And in the end she paid a great price for her affair with Paris: while you and I are able to toss off married names for fifty dollars and some paperwork, she remains Helen of Troy for all eternity. No matter that she settled peacefully with Menelaus in Athens and had a child.

My sister almost brushes against the circus men on the way out, and the white guy turns to watch her leave. She has a friendly, bouncy walk. She does not look back.

A paleskinned couple enters and sits on stools halfway down the bar. Perhaps they have been to a play. They move in unison, their onceindependent bodies working as complementary parts of a whole. He helps her take off her coat, and she gets him something from her purse. The Smallest Man in the World jumps down and moves across the room toward the jukebox, onto which his friend lifts him. When a song skips, Martin the bartender looks over coolly, but to his credit does not yell,

"Get off the jukebox." Though it has never occurred to me before, I consider this bartender a good friend.

Twenty years ago, when I was in high school, my mother and sister encouraged me to enter my first and only beauty contest, hoping that I could make friends. But even then I recognized most of those girls as shallow and hopeless bits of fluff, unaware of what freaks we were making of ourselves. And then, of course, they hated me for winning. It should not surprise anyone that P.T. Barnum himself pioneered the modern beauty contest, recognizing that striking beauty was fundamentally no different from any other aberration. Such absurdly perfect integration of a woman's bones, flesh, and features was not unlike a third arm growing out of the center of another woman's back. Barnum was the first to figure out that strangers would pay to see this sort of female oddity paraded before them.

The sweaty man with the strained buttons walks by on his way to the bathroom. When he glances at me, he trips over a runner on the carpet; he catches himself and regains his balance awkwardly, as though his own body has recently become a stranger to him. I tend Page 175