Large Animals in Everyday Life by Wendy Brenner Page B

night with bits of sentences and diagrams stuck in my hair. I still grinned at geckos and cypress trees, even though I’d lived in the South for the three years since college and those things should have been routine. I would sit and watch my lionhead goldfish for ninety minutes at a stretch, talking out loud to him and feeling every bit as satisfied as I would if he had understood me. I had peace and I trusted in it.
    Charlie, at first, seemed to fit into my life so easily; he kissed me like it was just another way of breathing. He hugged me tightly and with purpose, the way you hold a child who’s just come home from summer camp. We would be kissing and I would open my eyes and his would already be open, as if he were waiting for me. He worked in a distant and glamorous department of my company, in public relations, and when he spoke about us, he spoke with great confidence. He spoke as if it were only a matter of time before most people agreed withhim about most things. He laughed at hesitation and uncertainty in any form, and when he talked he made small, finalizing gestures with his large hands. I had been content with the banal—my fish, the Spanish moss, an occasional barbecue—but Charlie brought need, strong desire, and he did it with elegance, with grand finesse. “How this turns out,” he said frequently in his salesman’s voice, “is up to you.” “Whatever you want,” a phrase of indulgence, became, over time, imbued with menace. I wasn’t sure
what
I wanted, having never wanted much. Now, the more I wanted him, the more inevitable, immutable we seemed. It wasn’t long before I couldn’t remember ever
not
wanting him, ever being happy without him. Why was I arguing with him, why was I making myself so unhappy?
    On one Sunday morning, the morning after the first really bad time, we sat side by side like peaceful grandparents on the sunny second-floor landing outside our apartment’s back door. I kept getting distracted by the faint humid wind blowing beneath my legs and by my sore scalp, which felt in the sun as though it were heating from within. My whole body felt hungover, though we had not been drunk. Sitting between us on the concrete, like some Martian child, was a small roll-on bottle of Absorbine Jr. which Charlie had gotten from the 7-Eleven after breakfast, when I’d complained. He’d been silent, dabbing the cool medicine on my bare back and arms, the sore places from the night before where he had yanked me or where I’d pulled too hard to get away, and now the sweet minty smell steamed up from me, both foreign and reassuring. I hung onto the smell as though it really were a child, or a gift, as though it were the first thing about us.
    The day wobbled along around us, the fight of the night before looming everywhere and yet seeming unreal, comic, impossible to apprehend, like the balls and blobs of mercury from a broken thermometer, shaken from their context—dangerous, but in a way you could neither believe in nor ignore. We said little, both of us apparently wanting his apologies behind us. Ihad forgiven him hurriedly, feeling while doing it a rush of instinctive relief not unlike getting my head above water after a long submersion. That anything else lay down there still, beneath my relief, was not a possibility I considered.
    After a while a neighbor’s cat trotted by, carrying in its mouth a women’s pink cardigan sweater, as though this were a sensible thing for it to be doing. A short unnatural laugh came out of me, and the cat’s eyes shifted my way for an instant, then back at the sidewalk, the cat itself never breaking stride, the sweater sleeves swinging on either side of its stuffed jaws. I put my sore head down and laughed, great gulping laughs like gasping for breath. “You see?” I heard Charlie say. “That’s what I mean.”
    â€œWhat are you talking about?” I said. I