Our mother likes to fuck mayflies. She developed a taste for it early in life, along with the heartbreak that inevitably follows. This has granted her a gift for sadness. She takes pride in her ability to manage its rituals and routines. She knows all the right music and keeps a small library of poetry books on display in the living room.
“My whole life only lasts a single day,” her first mayfly said. “And I happened to fly by your high school.”
They lay together in the grass for what he claimed on his deathbed was the greatest moment of his life. Nine months later, there was my older sister, Angela: ten fingers, ten toes. Our mother had many more husbands, each marriage producing a brother who, like their fathers, lived for twenty-four hours, then died.
Each time, that is, until me, a good half dozen years after my sister. We’re the only girls.
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All the girls in our neighborhood were taught the same thing: be good, grow pretty, and find yourself an animal who’s never been to the zoo. We lay awake at night in our childhood bedrooms, hands running over our childhood bodies, imagining the kind of fire sparked between woman and beast, the heat we’d heard gossiped about at school. Ah, to be grown, we thought. The luxury.
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At nine, I watched from atop the playground as the animals descended on my sister and her friends. They swung from branches, climbed through windows, wriggled under doorways. Caitlyn, one of Angela’s classmates, met a giraffe who picked her leaves from the tallest branches of the trees. She wore them in her hair and recounted to her friends how the animal’s tongue was the color of a rain cloud. Angela fell in love with a wolf who howled at her on her way home from school. She tied her belt around his neck and brought him home to meet our mother.
From then on she saw little of the girls from school, as one by one, they each retreated into their new habitats. Becca went swimming and nobody ever saw her again. Lise climbed the tallest tree in the park. Sometimes very early in the morning, when I woke up just to look out the window and see how the prairie stretched into nothing, there would be Lauren H., eating from the garbage.
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Tony was unemployed. Our mother ran a feed store in town and offered him a job but he declined. “Me in a store all day?” It was not a wolf’s work. He said he prefered to make a living the traditional way, hunting game out past the hills.
“Of course,” said Angela, rubbing behind his ears. “It’s what you were made for.”
By now even I knew that no one in his family had made a living this way in a generation. His father worked security at a junkyard and two of his uncles were locked away in a zoo for petty trespassing. But Tony couldn’t be dissuaded when he put his mind to something. I think that’s what my sister loved about him: he never wallowed in inaction. It was a reprieve from our home life, where our mother had made a lifestyle out of crying openly at breakfast and dragging her heels.
Because I was small and could fit in places without making much noise, I often watched the lovers when they believed themselves to be alone. Angela buried her nose in Tony’s fur and ran the bellies of her fingers along his ribs. And as much as I’d admired her all my life, my sister was never as beautiful as she was during these times, the smile soft on her face. Even the sunlight wanted to touch her.
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Tony’s traditional territory was out past the hills, but when he brought back plumper pheasants than we’d seen in years, he admitted to venturing further: along the river and even into the city. Angela told him to be careful. “A strong animal like you,” she scratched beneath his chin. “Those city people could make a whole exhibit.”
“I’m nobody’s specimen,” Tony got tense when he was angry. He bore his teeth and growled, “You don’t think I know how to take care of you?”
But it wasn’t long after this that Angela waited up all night for him to return, then the next one too. On the third day, a letter came in the mail informing her that he’d been captured chasing rats behind a shopping mall and sentenced to the city zoo.
“My darling,” said our mother when she found my sister weeping on the floor. “Drink some tea.” She put on an old record and went on, “Trust me, I know how to do this right.”
Angela’s tears contorted her face. Her skin was red and her cheeks were puffy. She gulped the tea so that it burned her throat and sang all the wrong words to the songs.
“You’ll practice,” said our mother, sipping gracefully. “Soon you’ll be teaching ChrisAnn.”
I was in the kitchen, making my own breakfast and packing a lunch for school.
Outside of where we were from women did not marry animals. I knew this the way I knew many facts about the world at large: the name of the Prime Minister, that there was a country called France, how in some places people slept at night and in others the whole neighborhood took a nap in the middle of the afternoon.The knowledge was like precipitation I watched passively from the car. It was there, but it couldn’t touch me.
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The zoo was located in a small city an hour’s bus ride away. The first chance she got, my sister paid seven fifty (even though she was his mate) for a day’s admission. Tony’s ears perked up as soon as she entered the premises. “I smelled you!” he said, running towards her. She stuck her hands through the wire fence, even though it was not allowed. They stayed like that together, kissing and embracing, as long as they could.
That evening, Angela lay on the floor of my room, recounting all the details of the afternoon: “And he jumped up and licked me everywhere and said he loves me.” She wasn’t talking to me, not really. I just happened to be there. I could have disappeared entirely and the scene would have been the same.
Two months later, the second time my sister went to the zoo, she didn’t come back. We heard what happened later, when the events of the day made a splash on the local news. Angela rode the bus to the zoo and paid seventy fifty to rub her nose up against Tony’s. But this time, when it started to get dark she found a remote piece of fencing and while the keepers were changing shifts, she pried her way through.
In the morning, when they saw a woman in the wolf pen, they scrambled for ladders and wire cutters to keep her safe. One of them even had a gun. But Angela refused to leave. “Tony is my mate,” she told them firmly. “I’m not going anywhere if he isn’t coming too.”
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During this time, Tony and my sister were very happy. By spring she was pregnant, then gave birth to five puppies: Anderson, Spencer, Michael, Louis and Grrr. It was a big event at the zoo, as all births always were. Crowds gathered to see the wide eyed puppies suckle at her teats and it was written about in newspapers all over the world. Really, look it up. Those are my nephews. Allegedly, they even had our chin.
We would have gone ourselves to see them, but our mother was embroiled in a drama of her own, the death of my 93rd stepfather. We had a small ceremony, the usual poetry.
My sister once wrote me a letter describing in detail the moss-like texture of the babies’ fur. She could not write well and there were many spelling mistakes but her feelings were clear. So imagine her heartbreak when, by the time the pups were three months old, the keepers came and took them away. “You can’t!” Angela screamed. Tony bared his teeth and lunged for their fingers.
The keepers said that legally they could. Any animal born on the premises belonged to them. So the pups were sent to zoos in Cincinnati, Akron, and Quebec City. This put Tony and Angela into deep depression. He stayed up all night howling at the moon, she resented his theatricality. Didn’t he realize that she knew them more intimately than he could ever understand? They had lived inside of her. But he said that they were his kind and it was a bond that could not be underestimated.
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We visited the zoo only once, for my birthday the next spring. My mother wore heels and her best dress. I scrounged up some ribbon. The herd was quite something, so many human bodies and smells. At twelve, I was a lanky specimen who could just barely see over the tops of some heads.
Tony and Angela circled each other in the green grass. People pointed, some took photos. “Get him!” “Get her!” “Go! Go!” They cheered.
She was my sister, we had the same chin. I ran to her where she lay bloodied in the dirt and told her to come home. “You’re not like him. We are girls,” I said. “You aren’t trapped the way he is, you could be free.”
She looked at me but shook her head. “I love him.”
“But things are changing. Did you know they just widened the highway? There’s an Ikea now. You don’t have to be like mom.”
She brushed her hair out of her face and said she couldn’t help it. They needed each other, their bodies. No matter how many years had passed, however many disappointments piled between them, this would never change. “You’ll see one day, ChrisAnn.”
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The next winter, Tony died. I’d come to hear the story a thousand times. How that morning she couldn’t wake him. She turned him on his back, screaming his name, and in the end the keepers had to pry his body from her hands. Wolves only live about ten years and he’d had a difficult life.
Angela stripped bark from all the trees and tore out all the grass with her teeth and covered herself in dirt. The keepers weren’t quite sure what to do with her. One suggested they encourage her to stay, as having a live woman in captivity was a very unique attraction.
“Yes, but in a bad way,” said another. It was true that there had been some negative op-eds. She was very thin and at only nineteen appeared rather old for her age. Besides, women didn’t marry animals anymore, even in our town. It had gone out of fashion. Human being, the keepers said, it came with certain responsibilities. In the end, it was decided on her behalf that she would come back home.
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Things have changed for people like us. The city has expanded with profits from the oilfields and our town has been swallowed up by the sprawl. The whole neighborhood is different. Now there’s a cocktail bar across the street with acetate chairs. Likely, Angela made it the whole way home without seeing a single animal.
I am fifteen, just like she was. I go to an all girls school with a uniform: plaid skirt, white blouse, red tie fastened around my neck like a leash. All day: math, science, language arts. I stare out the window watching birds fly in and out of clouds. But they never look back at me. Neither do the squirrels who scurry up the tree trunks on my way home. Once, a bumble bee wreaked havoc in the cafeteria and there was nothing charming about it at all. Women don’t marry animals anymore, it’s simply not done. I’m expected to grow up and have a life all by myself.
So unlike my sister when she was my age, I spend most of my downtime alone, reading books and gathering facts about the world: Estonia is a country in Eastern Europe, espadrille a kind of sandal. In Australia, the toilets flush backwards and they drive on the other side of the road. My hope is that one day I might go somewhere. And when I do, I’ll be ready.
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Our mother is the best at being sad. She has a whole vocabulary–glum, melancholy, morose– and an essential oil to suit each mood. There are jars filled with her mates’ dead bodies along the window and as the sun shifts their wings glitter in the light. We light candles almost every day of the year, sometimes three or four at once. Our mother never wipes her tears when she cries. She instructs my sister and I to do the same. The tears are good for our skin, she says. Like the sadness is good for our spirits. It keeps us soft. This way, we will never be disappointed.
Angela has some skill, but to this day, she lacks the finesse of our mother. It is the sadness that rides her and not the other way around. Once, she found a tuft of fur caught between two floor boards in her room and wept. She left it there but visits regularly. Then she’ll crawl across the hall and into my bed where I am reading and tell me the same stories: how once, she ran away to the zoo and a wolf named Tony had loved her. The same stories, over and over and over again.
But I am coming to realize that I am the worst of all. I cannot take long baths without feeling restless, and I don’t have the cheekbones for that forlorn look that goes so well with pouting. I am hungry all the time, for food and for knowledge. Late at night, I howl at the moon and know that I am not sad at all.