Women & Other Animals Read Online Free PDF

flowing from my nether regions, I was ecstatic. But by the third month, I realized there would never be more than a trickle. Why? I screamed at my mother.
    Page 21
    Why all the goddamned fuss over this? To better express myself, I stomped into the backyard and pulled her rose bushes out of the ground with my bare hands, puncturing my palms, fingers and forearms with hundreds of thorns. I tossed the uprooted bushes at my mother and shook off those that stuck to me.
    As I pounded bloody fists on the picture window and cursed her, my mother was on the phone arranging an emergency meeting with Radcliff. She cleaned me up before bringing me in, but I found a paper clip on Radcliff's carpet and toyed with it while he spoke. "You're really upsetting your mother," he said. I pushed the end of the paper clip deep into one after another of the thorn holes, so that each in turn began to dribble blood. When Radcliff realized what I was doing, he swooped like a bat and slapped me full across the face. "Jesus fucking Christ!" he said and grabbed my shoulders. "Do you want to be locked up? Because that's what's going to happen if you don't stop this shit. Am I getting through?" He throttled my shoulders and shook me, his thumbs digging into my chest. "Think tranquilizers. Think electrodes." The sting from his slap radiated outward until my whole body buzzed with calm.
    "Tell your mother you're sorry," he said, loosening his grip.
    I shook my head yes. He let go of me, but I still felt his fingers, and I hoped there'd be bruises.
    Phys Ed had always been my favorite class, and in my sophomore year the gym teacher and track coach Ms. Heart cautiously invited me to join the track team. For months I had sensed her sizing up the wall of muscle beneath my skin, muscle as strong as chain mail, as tight as a straightjacket. After the first day of practice, she declared I was a mile runner. By the end of the season I would hold the school record for the mile, and in my junior year I would break the state record by more than a second. Each day Ms. Heart gave me a program written on an index card which took about three hours to complete. Sometimes before I could finish, I vomited behind the bleachers. The other girls slacked off, postured for the boys' track team, then lied to Heart about what they had done or else invented maladies. Heart was unsympathetic; running, she said, was the cure for cramps, headaches, and allergies. In her, as in Radcliff, I had an Page 22
    ally, a person who wouldn't turn soft, a constant force willing me to be stronger. When I jogged evenings in our neighborhood, it felt as though there were two of me: the person I saw in the mirror and that second creature with teeth like a pit bull, leashed and dragging a concrete block.
    On a particularly warm spring day, after sprinting a quartermile around the track, I stood panting, hands on knees, near the high jump pit. A redhaired boy lay in the sun on the landing pad, one arm bent behind his head, the other absentmindedly stroking his bare chest. He looked at me, as luxurious as a cat yawning, and let his thumb drift and then pause over his nipple. I became sensible of the wad between his legs. The heat from my own body was suddenly suffocating me, and I imagined that the boy's skin was cool. Only then did I realize how running and lifting weights had changed me. No longer was my muscle a single sheet beneath my skin, a rubbery exoskeleton holding me together. Each muscle in my arms and legs now felt like a separate creature, ready to chew through my skin and escape. When I was able to move, I sprinted around the school to the crosscountry path where I ran six miles without stopping.
    There's no sense pretending that I hadn't become goodlooking. Though my father resembled a sea cow, my mother and siblings were handsome enough. If the monster Medusa had been the most beautiful creature in the ocean at one time, why not me? My black hair dangled in ropes to my shoulders—I hadn't