Large Animals in Everyday Life Read Online Free PDF

dark lashes. “I’m on standby for half a dozen flights,” he said. “Anywhere warm. And you? Wait—let me guess. You’re a college student, right? Home to the folks for Christmas? No—I’ll bet you’re going to Palm Beach with five friends who look exactly like you, only blonder, right?
    â€œWell, close,” Helene said. “Phoenix. But I’m not a student.” She was making her yearly visit to an old high school friend whose parents ran a guest ranch.
    â€œAlways good to get away for the holidays,” Joe said. “Go somewhere hot and foreign, where people don’t get so worked up.”
    Helene sipped her vodka and 7-Up and silently agreed. She loved the tropical, slowed-down feel of life at her friend’s ranch, even though she knew it was inauthentic, produced by a paid staff for the tourists. There was something, nevertheless, about the palmettos and prickly pears and the birds that ran up and down on the footpaths that seemed to mock the guests and all their serious human activities. Helene supposed if you grew up surrounded by these crazy plants and wild pigs and coyotes howling like sirens in the night you might not feel so starved for extremity. You might just calm down and get on with your life. At any rate, she always came back to the Midwest. She had toadmit that what she loved about Arizona was probably only the novelty; you couldn’t base your whole life on what the foliage happened to look like. “So what do you do for a living?” she asked Joe.
    He told her he was the voice of time; he had made a local telephone time recording. They’d paid him a fortune for that, he said, and before that he had worked in a burlap bag factory that burned to the ground. He wore a stylish double-breasted suit, Helene saw, and he took his cigarette smoke up through his nostrils. “Are you also an artist?” she asked.
    â€œOh, Christ, no,” he said.
    Embarrassed, Helene glanced at the TV, on which an interviewer was now leaning forward toward his guest, saying, “So, do women
dig
conflict?” “You know,” Helene said, “I don’t go around picking up men in bars.”
    â€œDon’t sweat it,” Joe said. “You think innocents are any more
pure
than we are?” He paused dreamily for a moment, then said, “You’re just a little something God sent me.”
    No one had ever said anything like that to Helene. She slid her napkin out from under her glass immediately and got a pen out of her bag and wrote down her phone number for Joe. When her flight was announced he kissed her on the forehead and wished her good luck back at college. She was halfway down the long corridor to her gate, her heart pounding, before she realized she hadn’t corrected him. She thought of a phrase from one of the astrology guides she’d worked on:
When the student is ready, the teacher arrives
. At the gate a group of noisy, bright-jacketed teens were jittering around restlessly, clutching homemade posters that read WELCOME HOME, AMBER!! IF YOU’RE TAN, JUST GO BACK !!! I was never that cynical, Helene thought. I don’t ever want to be that cynical.
    Before Joe, Helene had only one other boyfriend. He was younger than Joe and much more ambitious. His life’s work, he knew at twenty-five, was in the public sector. He was very principled about certain things. He made Helene feel ridiculouslyimportant and minuscule at the same time. “I’m so proud of you,” he’d say to her, “with that little job of yours.” Once they had an argument which ended with him standing over her, kicking her in the side. The argument started over a TV program Helene liked, and ended with him shouting at her that she must learn to live in the real world. She thought, at the time, that he was trying to help her.
    Remembering that time in her life makes Helene’s stomach turn as though the earth has