Hall of Small Mammals: Stories

Why We Ate Mud

How will we know when the biscuits are ready?” Ellie is staring into the oven window. The tray is on the second rack from the bottom. The dough, still wet, isn’t doing much. Harry sits on the countertop, the back of his tennis shoes thumping the cabinet door. His black hair hangs sheetlike over his forehead, and he flicks his head quickly. It’s a tic he’s got.

“My mother’s making me go to church in the morning,” he says.

“When I was little, we went to church maybe once a month,” she says. “But I prayed every night, and I had this magazine cutout on my wall, and I thought it was a picture of God but later I realized it was just Allen Ginsberg.”

“You should just see my mother at church,” he says. “It’s obscene. She waves her arms like this during the songs.” He has his hands up over his head.

Ellie can’t help but laugh. Harry is living at home again and that means he has to do certain things. Take out the trash. Keep his nails clean. Believe in a higher power.

The biscuits glisten in the oven.

“Sometimes I wonder if my mother is on something,” Harry says. “I wish there were more drugs. Different ones. I wish there was a drug that made everything look two-dimensional. Like we were living on a sheet of paper.”

“I wish there was a drug that made everything taste like fried chicken,” Ellie says.

“I wish there was one that let you see every kind of light there is and all the colors we can’t see now.”

She looks back in the oven, and the biscuits are golden, maybe even a little brown.

“Let’s take them to the park,” she says. She wants to hang upside down from the jungle gym. The way they used to.

• • •

They go to the park with their biscuits protected in paper towels. Ellie has blueberry jam on her biscuit. Harry has butter on his. A little girl is already on the jungle gym so they sit down on a bench like the parents do. Ellie tugs loose a strand of her long brown hair and slips it into her mouth to suck on the loose ends. Her mother doesn’t like this habit, says it’s something little girls do and not women. “You could be so much prettier if you acted like it,” she sometimes says, which makes Ellie laugh because pretty, to her mother, means plucked and proper with a big pink Easter hat. Aside from her chin, which Ellie fears is maybe a tad doughy, she is satisfied with her body, the large blue eyes, the waist thin as a wine bottle. Her boyfriend, Bryan, says she’s got a “classic” look, plus amazing lips.

“I’m not a big fan of Bryan’s,” Harry says when Ellie brings him up. “He’s okay, I guess, but I don’t get you two together. As a couple, I mean.”

Ellie has been dating Bryan for not quite a year, but she doesn’t object when Harry puts his hand on her bare knee on the bench. It’s like old times. They finish their biscuits, and Ellie leads him into the women’s bathroom in the public park and locks the door. He lifts Ellie onto the edge of the sink, and the sink is wet. She feels herself sliding back into the basin.

“It’s kind of gross in here,” Harry says. “Sorry.”

He’s right, but that doesn’t stop them. They keep their tops on, and Harry is fast. He goes outside to wait on her. She needs a moment in the stall. On one of the walls, someone has written, HALLELUJAH BATHTUB. Ellie wouldn’t mind a hallelujah bath, whatever that is.

She joins Harry on the bench outside again. The little girl is gone from the jungle gym, but they don’t feel like hanging upside down anymore.

“I know I was a little fast,” Harry says.

“Next time will be better,” she says.

Next time is a little better. They are in her bedroom on top of the covers. Her mother is out to lunch. When it’s over they agree a nap seems like a nice idea, but neither of them can fall asleep. She tries to extrapolate an entire life from this moment, the two of them spooning together in her bed, time marked by the spray of the sprinkler slapping the window glass, by the whir of the overhead fan. She shuts her eyes and sees Allen Ginsberg’s shining bearded face. Harry, arm draped over her side, pretends to snore, then asks if she wants to make something in the kitchen. Biscuits — or maybe éclairs? His mother recently taught him how to make an amazing cream from scratch.

“Do you ever want to be somewhere other than here?” she asks.

He sits up, his back against the cloth headboard, silent.

“I used to say I was going to study dolphins when I grew up,” she says. “Bottlenose, Long-Beaked, Short-Beaked, Spinner. I had all the species memorized.”

“I do remember you having dolphin stickers on all your notebooks.”

She slides out of bed and stretches with her hands on the back of her head, spinning back and forth like a weather vane before a storm. “I’ve got plans with Mary now,” she says. “But call me later, okay?”

Ellie doesn’t really have plans with Mary because Mary is working today. Instead she drives over to her boyfriend Bryan’s house because he’s been out of town for the last few days to see his aunt and uncle. They watch some television and eat fruit Popsicles. During a commercial break, Bryan mutes the volume and announces that he may be moving to Charlotte.

“Why?”

“My uncle got me a job at his bank.”

“But you’re a drummer.”

“I’m still a drummer,” he says. “And now I’m a banker too.”

But she suspects that it is not really possible to be both things.

Bryan asks if she’d like to move to Charlotte too. It would be a big step, he knows — their names on the same mailbox, on the electricity bills, on a one-year lease. Ellie says she wants some time to think about it, and then they kiss for a little while.

During a commercial, she asks, “Did you know millions of years ago dolphins lived on the land and they looked like rat-wolves?”

He mutes the volume again. “Wait, what are we talking about now?”

“Dolphins. They had legs. So, basically they evolved from being water animals to land animals and then went back to being water animals again.”

There is an analogy here, somewhere, she’s sure of it, one in which she is the dolphin and Charlotte is either dry land or the ocean.

• • •

When she leaves Bryan’s house, Harry is parked across the street in his mother’s car. He has followed her here. His window is down but he doesn’t say anything until she’s all the way at the car, one hand on the roof. The paint between the ski rack and the top of the door is bubbled and cracked, the windshield splattered with dark berry bird shit.

“I thought you’d broken it off with Bryan,” he says.

She never said that. Not exactly.

“Get in,” he says. “Please.”

They drive to the top of a small mountain and park at the overlook. He sits on the guardrail with his legs over the side. With his phone he takes a picture of Ellie on the hood of the car.

“I’m ready to go home,” she says. “Let’s go.”

They stop for soft serve first. In the car his paper cup springs a leak. He’s got vanilla ice cream dribbled across his jeans. She rubs her hand up and down his knee a few times and points at the milk.

“That was fast,” she says, a bad joke. “Sorry.”

He crushes his empty cup and drops it on the floorboard with all the other trash — receipts, old printed Google Maps directions stomped with dirty bootprints, napkins, fast-food bags, straws with crushed and chewed-up tips. She worries the state of his car is a manifestation of some inner turmoil. Your car is a temple, a twenty-first-century Bible might say.

By the time they pull up in front of her house, she’s made a decision.

“I’m moving to Charlotte,” she says.

Harry says that’s awful news. The worst kind of news. Just what’s so bad about where they are now? he wants to know. He might be crying. Or maybe it’s the car’s dry heat. She can’t tell. “It’s not definite,” she says, and he perks up a bit.

“Good,” he says. “Then we can talk about it more later.”

• • •

She moves to Charlotte and works in an art gallery. Her favorite painting is on the back wall. Two red squares intersected by a blue. If someone asked why she likes it most, she’d have nothing to say. Every afternoon she drinks a small iced mocha with whipped cream on top. Bryan goes to work in a suit and within the year has gained twenty pounds. But their apartment is well decorated. The furniture comes from various online catalogues. She craves biscuits on the weekends but never makes them. She wants to stop taking birth control but Bryan says he’s not ready for that. He has a friend named Kara who also works at the bank. Kara wears thick mascara and speaks German, and she invites them to go tubing on a river outside Charlotte. “I could live my whole life floating down this river,” Kara says. Ellie thinks Kara is possible friend material. But one evening Bryan comes home and says, actually, he wants to be with Kara now. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t plan it this way.” Ellie wishes she were more surprised. When he moves out of the apartment, she can’t afford to stay for more than a few months. She has to move back home again.

• • •

She calls Harry on her mother’s phone but hangs up when he says hello. It has been two full years since the day in the park. If only there were a way to ensure a phone call went straight to voice mail. Voice mail was invented for rehearsed apologies. She could leave one for him, like a little gift on a doorstep he could unwrap again and again, without having to worry about what he’d say next.

Her old restaurant, despite new management, gives her a job again but now she’s required to wear black pants and a black shirt.

The bartender is new. Everyone calls him Big D for some reason, but he’s not very big. He drives a blue truck with a faded Dole — Kemp bumper sticker that he says came with the truck when he bought it.

“Where are you from?” she asks.

“From Georgia.”

“What do you like to do? For fun?”

“Sudoku,” he says, then adds, not at all sheepish, “if you want to know the truth, and probably you don’t, I spend a lot of time reading about aliens because I don’t think that we’re alone in the universe. I think we made contact a long time ago. Did you know that Eisenhower was on vacation in Palm Springs in 1954 and that he disappeared for a whole night? Later they said he was getting a cap put on his tooth, but there’s evidence he met aliens for the first time that night at Edwards Air Force Base. It’s possible aliens are already living among us. You don’t believe me, I can tell, but go to this website.”

He writes down the address on a bar napkin and slides it to her.

“What if God is an alien?” she asks. “Like, a really advanced one. So advanced that we wouldn’t know the difference.”

“Wouldn’t that be nice,” Big D says.

Ellie isn’t so sure.

• • •

Big D takes her to a restaurant with a thirty-page menu and every item seems to include cheese — macaroni and cheese, cheese strudels, cheese salads, cheese sticks, cheeseburgers, cheese chips, cheese on cheese. Then he takes her to a dinosaur museum, where they buy T. rex T-shirts. Then he takes her to a theme park with roller coasters named after movie franchises. One night, a little tipsy, they wind up in a tattoo parlor that smells like cigarettes and bleach. They flip through the floppy binders and laugh at the skulls, roses, the confused Chinese symbols for courage and harmony and whatever else.

“You could get a flying saucer over your heart,” she says.

“I know bartenders are supposed to, sort of, love tattoos,” he says. “But I can’t stand the idea of something being on my body forever.”

“Forever, in your case, being anywhere from thirty to fifty years,” she says.

“I’ve got more than that in me. I’m healthy as a—”

“—as a thirty-two-year old man, I know.” She peels the binder’s laminated pages apart, their stickiness making wet static sounds. “One day they’ll probably come up with extremely permanent tattoos. They’ll be genetic or something. You’ll get a dolphin on your ankle and your baby will come out with a dolphin on her ankle and her baby too and on and on until the end of time. Dolphins, all the way down the line. Then, real accountability.”

He smiles. They come to a picture of a gray cartoonish alien holding a bong. She draws a line in the air between the picture and his right shoulder. “There,” she says. “Perfect. It’ll look so great on your son too.” Immediately she regrets saying it. He gives her an odd look. Our son, he might be thinking. She’s been sleeping over at his house a few nights a week, and he’s already asked her to move in with him. She’s been evasive on this issue.

“Don’t rush into it.” Her mother’s advice. She’s not thrilled that Ellie is dating a bartender, of all things. What Ellie really needs to do, her mother says, is get her life in order. And that starts with a new and proper job. Her mother has been making phone calls, and a friend of a friend has arranged an interview at her company, if Ellie’s interested, and of course Ellie is, right? Ellie doesn’t want to wait tables for the rest of her life, does she?

• • •

The entrance to the building is lined with prickly bushes. Ellie is there early. Not because she wants the job. It’s just that parking was easier to find than she expected. She couldn’t care less about this job. When people ask her what kind of job she wants, she usually says, a job studying dolphins, or at least a job where she can use her hands. “Your hands?” her mother often says. “But we all use our hands.” Her mother sells insurance policies and uses her hands every day. How else would she dial out?

But Ellie wants to use her hands to fix something. Bones, maybe — or pocket watches. A hundred years ago, you probably could have made an entire career out of repairing pocket watches.

Inside the building, she gives her purse and keys to the guard and walks through an X-ray detector. She watches the guard watch the screen. Maybe he can see her bones. She hopes her bones are beautiful, or at least average. At the front desk, she gets a sticker that says TEMPORARY. In the elevator, she peels the sticker off her chest.

She has to wait for her interview. She sits down beside a man in a rough-looking suit. He seems nervous. When he scratches his mustache, little flakes of dandruff fall out of the hairs. His wristwatch is two minutes off the digital clock on the wall. He fiddles with the silver knob on the side until the times are perfectly synchronized.

Later, the secretary calls Ellie’s name and leads her down the hall to an office with glass walls. The man on the other side of the glass motions for her to come in and sit down. He is on the phone but smiles at her.

“Let’s talk about it over dumplings,” he says to the person on the phone. “You ever eat them? Good Lord, you gotta try the dumplings at this place I know around the corner. Yeah, they got chicken in them. You don’t eat chicken? Did I know that? Shit, sorry. I’m pretty sure they got fish ones too.”

The phone call ends. He stares at Ellie with bright green eyes, his hair combed forward and cut straight across his forehead, his blue shirt almost shimmering under the lights. He introduces himself as Burton. He takes some papers and a pen out of a desk drawer. He taps the pen against his chin.

“You might find our method unusual,” he says. “But we’ve found that the typical questions don’t tell us anything useful. We like to start with hypotheticals.”

“Okay,” Ellie says.

“Excellent,” he says. “Here we go. You’re given a shoebox. In the shoebox are three mice. All the mice are going to die, but if you smash one with a hammer, the other two can live. What do you do?”

Ellie has never killed a mouse before, not even in a trap. When she was growing up, her family had a cat that took care of things like that. She tries to imagine smashing a mouse with a hammer. She imagines the mouse as a very still fluffy thing on a cold cement floor. She imagines the hammer in her hand. She swings the hammer down, but instead of a crunch, she imagines wind chimes.

“Don’t think about these questions too long,” Burton says.

“I guess I’d kill the mouse,” she says.

Burton makes a mark. She asks if she answered correctly.

“No right or wrong,” he says. “These are hypotheticals. Next. You’re on a spaceship. You’re set to become the first person to leave the galaxy by traveling at the speed of light. But then you realize that, because of relativity, a hundred years will have passed when you return to earth, and everyone you know will have expired.”

“Expired?” she asks, and thinks of milk.

“Yes,” he says. “They’ll all be dead, but you will be the same age. Do you complete your mission?”

“So,” Ellie says, “I only realize this once I’m all the way out there in space?”

Burton makes another mark. Then, without waiting for her answer to the space question, he says, “You’re a devout member of a religious group. You discover that your Spiritual Leader, henceforth referred to as SL, is a charlatan. He’s stealing money from all the other followers. This one’s multiple choice. Do you: A. Call the authorities. B. Interrupt a religious service and present evidence of the SL’s wrongdoing to the followers. C. Alert both the authorities and the followers with a strongly worded letter. D. Confront the SL in private. E. Claim to be a new prophet and banish the SL from the existing group for reasons unrelated to the financial crime. F. Leave the religious group and write a tell-all book. G. Blackmail the SL for a cut of the stolen funds—”

“How many choices are there?” Ellie asks. “I think I’m losing track.”

“I’m almost done,” Burton says. “H. Start a new religious group and declare spiritual war. I. Go on a pilgrimage to a religious shrine and ask for God’s guidance. J. Wear a recording device and try to get the SL to admit the financial crimes on tape. K. Become an atheist.”

Ellie doesn’t know what to say. She grew up Methodist and nothing like that ever happened in her church. Their wine was grape juice. The minister played an acoustic guitar.

“I guess I’d do the thing where you confront the SL in private,” she says. “I mean, how much money are we talking about here?”

He doesn’t answer but makes another mark. Then he says, “You find out you’re pregnant and—”

He stops talking and looks up at her.

“Just so you know,” he says, “we ask the men this one too. Okay, you find out you’re pregnant, and it is revealed that your baby will very likely save the entire world one day. But giving birth to this baby might result in your own death. Would you terminate the pregnancy?”

“God,” Ellie says. “I guess I’d have to keep it, right?”

“And if that child only has a fifty percent chance of saving the world?”

“I guess I’d still keep it.”

“Twenty-five percent chance?”

“Maybe not,” Ellie says. “No, in that case, I probably wouldn’t go through with it.”

Burton makes a mark.

“I like you,” he says. “You seem to have your head on straight. You’d be surprised how many people don’t. By the way, do you know how to make a spreadsheet?”

Ellie says she does. Burton makes another mark and then presents her with a booklet and a pen for the essay portion. Ellie had no idea there would be an essay portion. He says it’s nothing major, just a few quick paragraphs. She’ll have fifteen minutes.

“Here we go,” he says. “The question is: How will the world end, and what will happen when we die?”

He leaves the room. Ellie didn’t get much sleep last night. She was out late for her friend Mary’s thirtieth birthday party, and her mind feels like Swiss cheese. She starts writing:

The end of the world will be like when the candles get blown out on a cake. Everything will end very fast but with a final little flicker so that we at least know it’s happening. Then the earth will just stop existing. And we won’t know why. We won’t even care why. Our souls will still exist but in a different way and they won’t care about why it ended because we won’t need the earth anymore. When we talk about the earth, we’ll laugh about how silly it was to be here. Earth will be like some dream we all had together. It will be like one of those dreams where you eat mud because in the dream eating mud seems like a perfectly natural thing to do. After the earth ends, it will be like waking up from a dream like that. We’ll all stand around wondering why we ate all that mud. Also, we won’t have private parts.

After Burton collects her essay, he shakes Ellie’s hand and says he’ll be in touch. She doesn’t feel confident. She probably shouldn’t have mentioned the bit about the mud. She probably shouldn’t have said she’d abort the baby with a twenty-five percent chance of saving the world.

Outside the snow is falling into the prickly bushes along the building entrance, collecting in the green groove of every leaf. She can tell the leaves are prickly but sticks her hand into a bush anyway. It pricks her in a few spots. She can’t tell where it hurts most. When she squeezes her palm, a few small drops of blood rise to the surface of her skin.

Ellie walks to the parking garage. She should call her mother. Her mother will want a full report. That can wait. She feels something in her pocket. She pulls it out. It’s the sticker that says TEMPORARY. She sticks it on the dashboard above the heater and drives to Pop-Yop, the soft-serve place where Mary works.

“But if they offer you the job, you’ll take it, though,” Mary says, wiping down a tabletop. Her friend, who used to say she was going to travel around the country in a Volkswagen Beetle selling homemade jewelry, has recently developed such a practical streak. She says she’s even been thinking about asking her brother for a loan so she can make an offer on this Pop-Yop. Ellie pulls the silver handle on the wall and fills her cup. Mary gives it to her for free so long as she doesn’t overdo it with the toppings. Ellie tries to never overdo it with the toppings but sometimes she can’t help herself.

• • •

Two weeks later, Burton calls to offer her the job.

“You’re our top choice,” he says. “And that essay. Loved it. So funny. I showed a few people. Hope that’s okay?”

Ellie doesn’t ask him what exactly he found so funny. She’s not sure she wants to know. She tells him she’d like a day to think about the offer, as if she has ten others to consider, but Ellie knows, eventually, she will accept. Otherwise her mother would kill her.

Big D organizes a small going-away party on her last day at the restaurant. He brings in chocolate cupcakes from the grocery store since the kitchen restaurant isn’t open yet. All the waiters and cooks stand around with dark chocolate in their teeth, asking Ellie questions about what’s next. This job, she wants to say, and after that, probably, some other job. Big D pours everyone a shot. He’s ready to pour another round but the manager says that’s enough.

• • •

She’s shopping for Christmas gifts at the mall when she sees Harry for the first time since moving back to town. He’s in the parking lot, loading giant boxes into the back of his car. He can’t believe it’s really her. Yes, she changed her hair. It’s shorter. He looks different too. He has a patchy beard and tired eyes.

“My oh my,” he says.

“Let’s get coffee,” she says.

They leave in his car. It’s snowing.

At a café, they order holiday coffee drinks and waters and a figure-eight pastry with some kind of cream filling in the holes like little yellow swimming pools.

Harry runs a food bank now. His jeans are too big for him. They sag low on his hips.

Ellie tells him she’s sorry, about everything, and he nods.

“So, you changed much?” he asks.

Yes, maybe, she says. But then again, probably not. She’s back home, after all.

Harry has big news to share. He’s engaged.

“Who’s the lucky lady?” she asks.

He whips out his cell phone and shows her a photo. The woman in it has brown hair, and she is very aware of the camera. That is, she’s smiling broadly, her teeth twinkling, brilliantly white and possibly a little sharp.

“Her name’s Caroline,” he says. “We met at the church.”

“As in, your mother’s church?” she asks.

“Technically it’s my church now too,” he says. “Caroline’s a teacher. We live on the other side of town.”

Ellie considers asking Harry if his fiancée waves her arms during the songs at church. But she decides that she shouldn’t. That would not be kind. Then she asks it anyway.

Harry smiles and blows a dent into the foam of his pumpkin spice latte.

They haven’t touched the pastry. Harry insists she take it with her, but the look of it makes her feel sick. She isn’t ready to go home yet, and so he drives them to the park, which is empty and a little cold. She wraps her jacket tight and leans into Harry. Through the metal bars of the jungle gym, she watches two gray squirrels chase each other around a tree. Around and around and around. So gratuitous. Harry puts his hand on her knee, and she doesn’t object. It’s like old times. She asks him if he thinks they are alone in the universe, and he smiles and says he reckons not. They climb onto the jungle gym and hang upside down. His hair touches the ground. Her face turns pink. She hopes they’ll make biscuits later.