Large Animals in Everyday Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

rush of city living, but really his spirit gets by, undiluted, sneaking around in his slow body. He still believes, in his late thirties, that he can get away with whatever he pleases. He lets his spine hang in a lazy posture of truth, for anyone who cares to notice, and of course Helene notices. Joe has a favorite, comical houseplant, a dimestore jade tree, that he claims reminds him of her. The plant fell apart once when he repotted it, but now it grows so rapidly it seems to stretch upward before his very eyes, with the same awkwardness Helene seems to suffer when she’s over at his place, trying so hard to act offhand. He says he expects someday to catch her stumbling around in a pair of dress-up pumps three sizes too large.
    They met at O’Hare International, in a cocktail lounge where a small crowd was waiting out a blizzard. It was just before Christmas, and the low-ceilinged room was dimly lit with strung bulbs. Everyone in the lounge was watching a news program on the wall television about a woman who’d been trapped under a piece of construction machinery for seven hours, but who’d lived and learned to walk again. People were turning to each other over their drinks to exclaim about this miracle. An airline worker wearing a weighty jumpsuit sat next to Helene. “I know of a club about a mile from here,” he said softly. “It only costs three bucks to get in and they got a pool that’s hot as a bathtub.” Helene nodded and kept her eyes on the TV. The airline worker shrugged and started telling her about his father, who’d died recently in an auto wreck. “It’s just plain hard,” he said. “You only get one father.”
    Helene tried to think if anything this difficult had ever happened to her, but nothing had. Her parents were clever agnostics who didn’t believe in sadness or the unknown. Her mother, for instance, could tell you what they’d be having for dinner three weeks from now. Helene imagined that when it was her parents’ time to die they would manage to make a rational decision out of it somehow, just as they chose what vegetable went with pork chops or what color carpeting to put in Helene’s old bedroom when she moved out. Unreasonable occurrences such as auto wrecks kept their distance from Helene’s parents. On the other hand, so did miracles. For that matter, so did Helene. The airline worker was still watching her hopefully. She coughed and turned away, and there sat Joe on her other side, looking ageless and arch and familiar. He gazed at her as though he’d been gazing at her on and off for years.
    â€œIf you think that’s bad,” he said finally, “listen to what happened to me. I went to buy a goldfish this morning and the bus I was on ran right over a cat. Broad daylight. Killed it.” Helene felt her face fall, out of her control. “But wait,” he said, “that’s not all. I got to the aquarium store and it was all boarded up!Apparently the old man who ran the place got
hit by a car
, running across the street for lunch. Can you believe it?
    Helene shook her head. She couldn’t tell if he was actually self-pitying or just trying to get her to talk. It seemed that he might be neither. “Well,” she said, “I was at the YMCA the other day and I overheard two little girls in the locker room, and one of them said, ‘You look like a woman,’ and the other one said, ‘I do?’ and the first one said, ‘Yeah.’ It was wild.” Helene knew she was striving for non sequitur. Joe looked surprised and slightly touched. They exchanged names and she took note of his bad complexion and the precise way his lips came together. “Are you waiting for a plane?” she asked. Her own flight was grounded, not because of the blizzard, but mechanical trouble.
    â€œI’m trying to get out of the country,” Joe said. Helene noticed his dark whiskers,