Large Animals in Everyday Life Read Online Free PDF Page B

suddenly reversed in its orbit. She wishes she could pull the rug out from underneath her memories. She is smart enough to know about things like taking charge, responsibility, Oprah Winfrey, about independence being the redemption of the modern woman. But certain of her longings she cannot seem to eliminate. She would just like to
locate
her faith, get it down to a science, like packing her lunch each night. Jan, at work, seems disgusted with her. “You know what you need to work on?” she asks Helene rhetorically. “Your relationship with your
self
.” Another of Jan’s favorites is: “We all cause our own happiness and unhappiness, and the sooner you accept that, the better.” But Jan might as well be from Mars as far as Helene is concerned. She lives alone, Helene knows, and is constantly modifying her diet, eliminating sugar, adding brown rice, as though health is a mountain that need only be climbed, as though appetite is of no consequence whatsoever. She is active in small political organizations that support distant and obscure causes, and she often urges Helene to “get outside” herself and come to a protest or a rally. At the office, Jan snaps Polaroids at parties, keeps the money for the football pool, and gets mildly involved in everybody’s business. Helene supposes she herself is too self-involved, too busy tallying, stockpiling, looking for various affirmations, to get up much steam for Jan’s type of activities. She supposes Jan has a point. Helene is, after all, tired of so much craving.
    Early one morning, an unassuming spring dawn, Helene gets up and goes into Joe’s chilly bathroom. She has slept at his apartmentonly two or three times so far. There on the edge of the sink sits his bar of soap, plastered with dark short hairs from his head. She feels like she’s seen his diary, or a hidden scar; she can’t believe his body let this happen. She can’t believe the soap let this happen. She can’t believe she’s allowed to see this. By the time she tiptoes back into the bedroom it is filled with light. She eases under the comforter, unsure if Joe is conscious. “What happened to you?” he mumbles.
    â€œI found salvation in your bathroom,” she says, trying to make it sound like a joke. She watches Joe slip so easily back into sleep, and quiets her heart, trying, as hard as she’s ever tried anything, to match his slow deep breathing.
    â€¢ • •
    Joe has been engaged to be married twice in his life. The first time was to a precocious girl who wanted him to help her hold up a Circle K store just outside of Amarillo. He didn’t go through with that plan, but they did drive all over Texas together in a Vega loaded with half-empty liquor bottles and assorted ammunition. Every town they stopped in they charmed people. The girl wore a football jersey that said “Mikey” on the back, and Joe wore a string tie that fastened with an enormous lump of turquoise. Men in filling stations kept calling him “Mikey” when he paid for gas. Eventually, the girl decided to go back to school, and made this clear to Joe one night by throwing a folding chair at his head. He recovered and met an internationally known runway model at a party in Houston where he tended bar. The model’s father was a Nigerian statesman who had survived the revolution there, money intact. He seemed to like Joe’s offhand wit, or perhaps his taste in clothing; at any rate, it was decided that Joe would marry the runway model, who was actually only seventeen. This engagement lasted three weeks and then the model shaved her head and tried to shoot her father. Her father bought Joe a one-way plane ticket to a Northern city. This was allgoing on in Joe’s life at the same time Helene was a ten-year-old making God’s eyes out of yarn and sticks at summer camp.
    Joe doesn’t recall the exact moment he first laid eyes on