When We Were Animals(61)

Now, though, I tried not to go into my father’s office at all. A border, a line had been drawn between us. Also, I didn’t like to catch sight of the map I had made him, framed and hanging on the wall. All his creations were so pure and crystalline. Everything I made was corrupt.

I was different now. And he was different, too, though he put on a show that suggested otherwise.

We were all going on with our lives as though the world had not been burned to the ground, as though we had not all become grotesques in a pathetic and disgusting circus. Everybody pretended that everything was just as it had been before.

But I, for one, was made sick by reminders of what the world used to be.

I cleared my room of all its stuffed animals. I boxed them up and put them in the very back of my closet. Harmless animals with big baby eyes and soft, cuddly fur. It seemed like a cruel joke that I was only now beginning to understand.

I sat in the middle of my empty bed then, my knees to my chest and my chin pressed into my knees, and I tried to think of my home as one of my father’s computer models—all straight lines and pure white planes. So clean, and everything calculated, accounted for. I could spin it in my mind, floating and free, with nobody but me inside.

*



Sometimes you were impatient for the full moon. Because you were just looking for a reason to run.

I was growing sour to the appurtenances of civilization—the clerks at the stores, the way they smiled politely and bestowed pleasantries on you. The progressive roar of lawn mowers, the tittering of sprinklers.

I went to the mine. It was between moons.

I went to my holy place, the cistern, and I prayed my prayers down into the pit. There were two songs that my father used to sing to me when I was a little girl, and I sang them both down into the void. They echoed and disappeared.

Nothing was the same as it had been.

One day you were one thing, and the next day you were another.

*



Even now.

I bake snickerdoodles for the meeting of the community league at Marcie Klapper-Witt’s house. I pile them high on a cut-crystal platter. Marcie puts them on a long table with other snacks brought by other upstanding members of the community. Fancy, Marcie’s daughter, walks up and down the side of the table, sampling the food. She borrows a brownie, takes one bite, and puts the remainder back on the tray. Same thing with the thumbprint cookies, then the cucumber sandwiches. No one watches her.

There is a planter in the shape of a dachshund, and while the girl stands on tiptoes to reach a platter of truffles on the back of the table I take the planter and place it on the ground just to her right. When she moves to continue down the length of the table, Fancy Klapper-Witt stumbles over the dachshund and falls, the tiara tumbling from her head. She begins to cry, sitting there like a pale pork, her hands raised in supplication.

Her mother rushes over, grabs the girl up in her arms, asks her why she moved the doggie planter.

And me? I retrieve the tiara from the floor and deliver it back onto the feathery blond head of the little girl.

Her mother smiles at me gratefully.

My husband, Jack, does not attend these meetings—but I am surprised to see there a woman I recognize. It’s Jack’s colleague from school—the one who sits on his desk. Her name is Helena, I learn, and she teaches art. Her hands are speckled with dried paint, her fingernails short and scuffed. I don’t speak with her, but I put myself in position to overhear her conversations. She has a very melodious voice, and she is absolutely positive about the world. She just recently moved into the neighborhood from California, of all places. She misses the weather there, but she finds the people here delightful.

I follow her from room to room, remaining unobserved. Helena is attentive and careful, much like me. Once, she goes into the kitchen, and I peek at her from around the corner. I see her rinse her glass in the sink—and then, thinking she’s alone, she picks something from between her teeth with her fingernail and flicks it into the sink.

I like a woman who pays attention to her teeth.

When the meeting itself gets under way, we all sit around in a big circle in the living room. I stay toward the back, leaning on a windowsill, directly to the right of Helena. She has marvelous ideas about the restoration of the local park. When she is lost in thought, I notice, her lips part slightly and she breathes out of her mouth.

Only once do our eyes meet, and she gives me a small, indistinct smile, as though we were casual compatriots. I wonder if we are.

*



It was the middle of March, between moons, and our town had its first spell of spring. Afternoons, I would open the window of my bedroom and let the breeze curl the pages of my homework as I finished it. Then, thinking to avoid my father and Margot Simons, I returned to the mapping of the mines. There were too many people aboveground, too many rivalries, too many betrayals, too many suffocating passions—so I went below and found absolution in the pitch black of those lonely passages.

Underground, the air was tight, and the empty spaces felt like a persistent ache—those crumbled walls, those low overhanging beams that were so soft they sometimes turned to wood dust in your grip. I did not mind stumbling upon dead ends, because it meant I could call an end to whatever tunnel it was on my map. I marked cul-de-sacs with special skull symbols. Pretty soon my map was filled with skulls. You could travel in many directions, but there was only one destination.