Women & Other Animals Read Online Free PDF Page A

misery, and something like guilt even pricked me on occasion, but such feelings were pebbles at the bottom of my stomach while madder passions rushed through me like white water. After she dragged me home, I stomped upstairs, kicked a new hole in the drywall under my window, and began chewing my hand, working it the way the pit bull worked his rawhide, biting to feel the force of teeth on both sides, stopping just short of puncturing the skin.
    Perhaps if my parents had beaten me, or even spanked me, there would have been some relief. Perhaps by transference, the release of their anger would have diminished some of my own. But the anger of the family—if not of the whole lower peninsula of Michigan—was concentrated in me. The others in my family were driven by feeble emotions like heartbreak, astonishment, and some happiness. My parents, after all, were peaceful people who lamented only in silence the forgotten pill, or the broken condom, or the illfitting diaphragm—whatever misadventure caused that one over energized sperm to penetrate the defenses and pierce the shell of my mother's egg. Or perhaps the egg itself had kicked away the diaphragm, torn the condom, taken the dumb sperm by the tail and devoured it.
    One evening while they ate supper in the kitchen, I sat with my TV tray in the living room. I usually watched the news in hopes of seeing fires or foreign brutalities, but today I had found Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde . When good Dr. Jekyll turned into evil Mr. Hyde, hair sprouted from the backs of my hands in sympathy. "I am free!"
    shouted Mr. Hyde. "I am free!" He could whip that Irish girl like a horse now, just as I could whack Tommy Pederson with a lunch box while he wept and drooled.
    Laughter tinkled from the kitchen. My
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    sister was on the middle school basketball team, and my family was celebrating some victory of hers with no idea what fate might await them. I twisted my mouth and imagined myself swaggering into the kitchen, knocking their microwaveable dishes to the floor and throttling their soft necks, one after another. I finished my dinner, imagining it was live bugs and amphibians instead of meat loaf and string beans, and then I chewed my thumb until it bled.
    When my parents noticed my new form of selfmutilation, they bribed me with a promise of a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde book with over a hundred photo stills from the movie, and sent me to a real psychologist, Dr. Radcliff. Throughout several sessions, I growled in his office, halfheartedly willing my transformation to pit bull terrier at the reduced rate of sixty dollars an hour. He watched me, amused, arms crossed over his chest. He was a cleancut man in his thirties, broad in the shoulders and not tall, apparently married to the rabbitlike blonde gritting her teeth in the photo on his desk. After a couple of weeks, when I finally deigned to sit in his patient's chair, he let loose with his twisted behaviorist theory. Whatever I felt, he said, was fine, just don't let on to anybody. Selfcontrol was the key to survival.
    "When you are older, eighteen or so," said Radcliff, "you can sleep in a doghouse, but for now, just pretend to be a civilized girl so they don't put you away or give you shock therapy. Humor your mother and eat your oatmeal instead of bugs, for God's sake." I did give up the bugs, but not for God's sake or my mother's. There was something about Radcliff's bulldog chest and forearms, his sweatycologne smell, and the Dracula green eyes. While the school psychologist had never stopped chattering and humoring me, Radcliff could sit silent for a full fifty minutes, waiting for me to answer a single question. I came to view him as a mentor, a man who refused to be shocked or seduced, a solid wall against which I could ram myself without fear of breaking it down.
    Things went more smoothly for the next few years, until, as the school's brainnumbing health movies had promised, I began to menstruate. When I first discovered blood