Large Animals in Everyday Life by Wendy Brenner Page A

with a face the color and texture of stone sits behind the counter, watching a newscast on a black-and-white wall television. He nods and takes my money. On the TV a man is speaking in Chinese, and a translation appears beneath him: “We couldn’t determine whether here is a detective.”
    â€œThey’re everywhere,” the man says to me, sliding me my change. “When you least expect it, expect it.” He might be talking about detectives, communists, the Chinese—it’s impossible to tell. “You traveling alone?” he says.
    â€œNot far,” I lie.
    â€œBe careful, that’s all I’m saying,” he says. I thank him and back out, keeping my eyes on a spot on his shirt.
    Georgia is a lengthy drive, south to north, and it keeps getting foggier and hillier. I listen to all-talk radio and learn unlikely things, that “alfalfa” is Arabic for “father of all foods,” that racehorses aren’t allowed more than seventeen letters in their names, and that in Tokyo lonely old people rent actors to play visiting sons and daughters, actors who are trained how to laugh and how to say goodbye. These all seem like fine things to know for now—if nothing else, they are things I didn’t know while I was with Charlie. They make as much sense as anything. Life, I think, is like one of those games where everyone sits in a circle and each person must, in turn, remember one more item in a series. You have to remember the whole series each time, in order, or else you are out.
    Early this morning I tiptoed out of the bedroom, my smallest muscles tensed. But Charlie didn’t wake up; his face remained puffy and unmenacing in sleep. I went out to my car, expecting determent: slashed tires, a dead battery, anything. I remembered once when I was a child and my mother had planned a driving trip, packing up the car the night before, as I had now. In the morning when she opened the driver’s side door, a kinglet flew out—the tiniest, most perfect bird I’d ever seen. This morning, now that I was finally leaving, I expected and even hoped for something like that to happen, but there was nothing to stop me, to make me think. The best I could come up with was the raspberry Danish someone had splattered all over my windshield a few days earlier, when I’d been withdrawing my savings from the bank. I hadn’t taken it personally, because the parking lot was crowded and I was inside for half an hour, but when I mentioned it to Charlie, leaving out the part about my savings, of course, he said a woman had probably done it. He said a man wouldn’t mess with something as petty as a sweet roll. “A man would’ve bent your rearview or broken off your antenna,” he said.
    I told him he was wrong, that women had respect for things like Danishes, and men didn’t. He just laughed, the way he kept me from ever being right about anything. I remember still thinking stubbornly: A woman wouldn’t do that to a Danish.
    What I can’t remember is when I got used to being wrong so often. It started with such minor things—what kind of dish drainer we should own, whether to keep his clock radio or mine by the bed, which was the superior brand of corn flakes. I had no experience with bullies. We’d met at someone’s backyard party by a kudzu-covered wall where I’d chosen to drink, and his awful confidence had probably only seemed wholesome, as solid and natural a part of my happy evening as the beautiful green-and-rock wall. I don’t even remember when we began to speak, or what was said. It didn’t seem like an event, which was probably why I trusted it. I knew if something seemed too good to be true, it probably was, and I put no stock in Princes Charming. My life was solitary and easy then. I was stagnating happily in a futureless position as a keyliner for a commercial line of do-it-yourself books, walking home from work each