Feral the Book

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Chapter 1 - Inside the Box

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AUGUST 

 

I’d never been more up close and personal with my bathroom than when I found myself lying face down inside it with my left cheek pressed flat against the cold ceramic tile near the toilet.

 

That was when a thought hit me like a miracle: A dog. Wait, a dog? Yes, a dog! It was an easy, obvious solution to my problem. 

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Should I get a dog? Definitely. The sooner the better. Was I behaving impulsively? Not at all! And I’d have plenty more time to think this through while lying on the floor of my bathroom tonight.  

 

My house was more than 60 years old. It probably had more layers of paint on its walls than the giant oak tree in the yard had rings. If these walls could talk! Surely over the past 60 years this wasn’t the first time some sorry-ass wife had locked herself inside this bathroom while her deranged, hollering husband smacked on the door outside? 

 

Except her floor would’ve been cleaner. I was surprised to discover my bathroom floor still smelled of that putrid minty tile-and-grout cleaner I’d used. How long had it been since I cleaned this floor? Months? I hadn’t done much of anything in my house since early June. 

 

Outside the bathroom my husband Mark knocked anxiously on the door. It was maybe only fifteen minutes ago that he’d returned home from a sports bar when I ended up down here and he ended up out there. Drunk. 

 

“Come on, let me in! I know you aren’t listening to me! Why won’t you listen?” And then, “What an asshole! I told you I fucking hate cheaters, Angie!” When he got to the second syllable of my name his voice went up a stitch, then broke in half like a pubescent boy’s. Followed by more knocking. “It’s not fair!” He repeated those words three times for effect, drawing out each line like a melodramatic Irish pub song. 

 

The door knocking continued at the same raggedy pace, only it was no longer coming from four feet up but from the bottom of the door instead. I heard his breathing there and caught a faint whiff of the beer. “Why him, Ang?” His words carried clearly through the crack in the threshold, then reverberated off the ceramic tiles. I realized both of us were lying on the floor now. Which might feel comforting to me if not for how upset he sounded. “Why’d it have to be him?” he wailed again as my heart pounded quickly in time with the knocks. I noticed this time his voice sounded weaker and watery. He was fading. 

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I took my hands off my ears and turned from the floor toward the wall, wondering what lay beneath the surface of its pale blue brush strokes, searching its four corners for a darkened dent that would reveal another paint, a small opening where I could slip into another time. What did a woman do in 1958 with all this hurt inside her, inside a box made of different colored walls? Simple: she’d paint over it. Maybe by morning I could forget about tonight and Mark would too. But I won’t forget about the dog. 

 

Oh yes, the dog! 

 

Undeniably the timing for getting a dog was perfect. A new life could arrive here in September, precisely as planned! 

 

Something soothing and calm would be good for me right now. And soft, it had to be soft. Like a velveteen rabbit. As for the type of dog? Well, a greyhound of course. Exactly like the one I’d met in the pottery shop last week. Patiently present beside me, solemn eyed but loving, long-bodied yet collapsible, able to fold itself up and squeeze onto the couch with me. Or cuddle with me on the bathroom floor as needed.

 

“Please, Ang? Unlock it … ”

 

I played with a rather large tuft of hair I found next to the baseboard, twisting its fine cottony strands around my finger before blowing it away toward the bathtub. Christ, I already have three pets in this house! Perhaps that was three too many for me to handle at the moment? Let alone four. 

 

But no, I was certain that this next one would be different. Yes, this would be the one that could save me.

 

* * *

 

When I was a young child of maybe four, my Aunt LaDonna asked me to tell her my favorite song. According to family folklore, I’d earnestly replied to her with, “Kitty of My Life,” which was followed by a cackling chorus of aunties, uncles and teenage cousins as if I’d told them the funniest joke they’d ever heard. I have no recollection of the song’s existence, nor can I imagine how the lyrics might go. Did I make it up? Maybe it was an honest misinterpretation of something I’d heard on the radio? Or was I simply trying to will it into existence?

 

I’d been an animal lover as far back as I could remember. More like addict. While others facing tough times might turn to drugs to get by, I grew up believing that animals could save me from my suffering. And even more fantastical, without adding any suffering of their own. As a teenager, I at one point had a pair of goldfish, a tumor-riddled hamster who’d endured three lumpectomies over her short lifespan, two slithery anoles who inconveniently only ate live bugs, two over-exuberant parakeets whose screeching could drown out my brother’s death metal music down the hall, and an aggressive egg-laying cockatiel I’d regrettably named Luigi, all living rent-free in my bedroom for years before I even so much as got to first base with a boy. Certainly that was why.

 

I blame old Disney movies for starters. For example, there was the 1985 film, The Journey of Natty Gann, which I recorded from a network television’s Sunday night feature and replayed dozens of times later on an old VHS tape until the story was practically tattooed on my frontal lobe. If you’ve never seen the film or need a refresher, may I point out that it was the wolf in the movie that ultimately led young Natty Gann to reunite with her lost father. And it was the wolf that was looking down on her from the mountain in the final scene when Natty runs to her dad, tears streaming down both their faces as they embrace and the credits roll. True, the story wasn’t about the wolf. But without the wolf, none of that pathetic plot would hold together. And Natty Gann never would’ve found her way.

 

Maddeningly, what Disney failed to include in the story were any scenes where the wolf ripped a hole in Natty’s pillow, strung feathers across the hallway, then pooped them out in the backyard later in pokey little piles. I never saw Natty force her weight onto the wolf in order to snip the tangled dingleberries from his hind fur while he scratched and howled in protest, and certainly at no moment in the film did she clean up a regurgitated sanitary pad from her bedroom rug at four a.m. No. Disney only showed us that magnificent, heroic creature standing on the mountain top watching over Natty. It was the ultimate scam.

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But even before seeing the movie, I was already groomed for addiction. I came from a long line of animal junkies that hailed from my mother’s side. I don’t know how far back it went, our mental affliction, because families usually prefer not to speak of such things. 

 

My mother’s grandfather, widowed and lonely in his golden years, trapped and tamed backyard squirrels as a hobby. And his most beloved pet squirrel, Charlie, my mother once told me, ran errands with her grandfather into town, riding shotgun on his shoulder into stores. That man is even nuttier than his damn squirrel, people had whispered. You reckon he has rabies?

 

My mom’s mother kept her syndrome more contained. After all she was a farm wife with farm animals and responsibilities. Farmers didn’t own animals for companions but commodities — God knows love and affection wouldn’t put food on the table. Her animals should be outdoors or served on a table! And they don’t belong on her shoulder! 

 

My grandmother had a Siamese cat named Sam who rode on her shoulder — although never into town, thank God. And in her twilight years, in the privacy of her own kitchen, she kept her television turned to the Animal Planet channel. Bound to the stove as she was taught of her era, she baked pies for the church luncheons by day. But all the while she’d escaped her Nebraska farm life and was off on some foreign adventure with her wild kingdom. “Oh, stop for a minute and listen to this guy,” she’d say mid-whisk of a pudding pie filling on the stove. “Isn’t he something, Angie?” And we’d have to pause our conversation to listen to a hoolock gibbon calling his mate.

 

My mom liked to push sappy animal stories on me — generously, shamelessly, like other mothers did with chocolate chip cookies. So I’d sulk off to my room after a particularly hard day of adolescence, and there I’d find Arnie the Darling Starling dog-eared for me on my bed. There was always a saccharine creature-feature in her Reader’s Digest magazine to get me by, some broken-down bird who’d nursed a widow’s heart right after she mended its injured wing. By the end, Gloria wondered to herself, maybe Woody was the one teaching her to fly? 

 

So what was I to think of all this but that animals could save me too? 

 

“It’s not fair …” Mark interrupted my thoughts with a now-squeaky refrain of his previous number and then slapped an open palm against the door, a final note of emphasis to conclude our enthralling evening. Then he let out a whimper followed by silence. I held my breath and silently prayed.

 

More than ever, I needed to be saved. 

 

 

ONE MONTH LATER

 

Four years into marriage, four months after I was pregnant with my first baby, I returned home with a freshly boxed pet. It was September, the same month my son Noah was to be born. Except he wasn’t. He died in utero, barely making it through the spring.

 

About the time I’d intended to be pushing a stroller home from the park, I now hauled a hole-punched box from the car. I felt it shifting in my hands as I walked into the house, redistributing a slight weight back and forth against the cardboard sides as if bravely attempting to flip itself from my grip in a dramatic escape attempt.

 

I hoped this new life would fill in the hole left by our baby’s absence. A hole that in time collapsed deeper inside me, into a bottomless pit from which there was no clear escape. Like Noah, I barely made it through the spring. Then I barely made it through the long aching summer to follow. 

 

I’d spent much of that prior summer hiding out in my house, only leaving for work and bare essentials. Bare essentials included saltine crackers and sliced mozzarella, which I came home from my office to eat during lunch breaks, building them into neat little finger sandwiches so as to appear to be a genuine meal made by a genuine grown-up. Along with watching reruns of Leave It to Beaver, it was all part of a regressive self-soothing ritual I learned from my “latchkey kid” days, back when I at times felt similarly alone.   

 

A Cosmo quiz I once took in college told me I was an extrovert — the person likely to be found telling stories to a bunch of half-conscious 20-somethings nursing from their red plastic cups. Or at least that was how I interpreted it back then. Though the drinkware evolved in my 30s, this fact held true until our baby died. Social engagements, party guests, now they were something to dread, even to fear. So I carefully avoided them and the possibility of anyone mentioning our loss to me. 

 

Especially in those anemic words, “Sorry for your loss.” 

 

Loss softened up the edges, a cop-out, I thought, a polite way to tip-toe around the rough ugliness of a death still living on inside me. And always left unspoken were the critical parts that came with it. Loss? Of my baby, of my pregnancy, yes — but of what else? My appetite? My faith in God? My confidence as an adult? My belief in things working out for the best? 

 

Or there was the lack of any mention of our loss — I avoided that, too. Somehow both scenarios felt equally traumatic. A party for my husband’s work began with me gasping for air in a Famous Dave’s parking lot. It ended with me sobbing in the car. Like some kind of tragic Hollywood red carpet walk — as clearly you’d expect at a strip mall joint that served sandwiches on honest-to-God trash can lids — I thought I’d enter the room under attentive spotlight, to all eyes firmly on me, to those same drippy looks of sympathy I got from the nurses at the hospital. 

 

Except then it was comforting. Now it felt smothering. 

 

So there I was one day in mid June, steeling myself all day to prepare for their sympathetic looks — the fear nearly consuming me on the drive over as my breath began to shallow, then quicken — and instead I arrived to find just the opposite. Instead of the tragic red carpet walk, I was the D-list actor quickly ushered to her seat. Did I even have a seat? Eyes darted away from me as soon as they landed, conversations pivoted from me at the table. 

 

Mark’s office coworkers, who earlier in the year offered to throw us a baby shower, the ones who barbecued with us, spent Halloweens at our annual costume party, now treated me like a stranger. And in a way they were correct. I was a stranger now, to myself, to my own body especially. Stranger than I ever felt in my life.

 

I’m a walking fetal tomb. 

 

That disturbing thought hit me as I walked back to the car later that night. I imagined if my stomach were transparent like it seemed, you’d see a tiny coffin where our baby came to rest. And the little soul that left my body, it took mine, too. If an expecting mother is said to glow, what was the look of a woman carrying death in her womb? Was I tinged in gray, a hollowed out face atop a concave body? That night surely proved it. I looked just as grotesque to others as I felt.

 

“No one would look at me!” I wept to Mark on the drive home. 

 

“They just don’t know what to say, that’s all,” he countered softly. 

 

Mark was always better about not giving any thought to the opinions of others. Mark once danced to The Little Mermaid’s Under the Sea that played on a grocery store Muzak station because the spirit had moved him in the produce aisle, trading nods with an elderly woman pushing past him with her cart as he began slapping on a honeydew like a steelpan drum. (I had snuck away before his encore.) “Did you see that lady, she thought it was funny,” he’d said after spotting me hiding from him beside the deli counter.

 

Whereas for me, “What do people think?” was at times all I could think about, like a part of my brain hadn’t evolved since middle school. I couldn’t so much as walk into that grocery store without wondering, How do I look walking into the grocery store? Is my posture okay? Do my arms swing correctly? 

 

“No, that’s not it!” I flicked off the car radio and cried harder. “They don’t want to look at me, Mark!” My voice became shrill as it narrowed to the point where I could smugly rest my case. “Do you know what it is? It’s that I remind people that bad things can happen.” I paused for a dramatic gasp of air. “And nobody wants that reminder over buffalo wings on a Friday!” 

 

Friday tasted like rotten fruit on my tongue, and I spat it with contempt for what it meant to everyone there. A tasty red cherry on top of their week, a nice exhale that would never come for me. Not that day, not the next, not in any weekend soon to follow. 

 

I vowed to skip parties after that. Surely a nice exhale for everyone involved. 

 

But then, following that restaurant night, my sadness turned its shape into something harder. Into something sharper. It seemed something in me had been settled that night over spicy wings on a trash can lid. An internal agreement, a permission I’d been granted. And soon thereafter I leaned straight into the ice-cold shards of Rage! in my heart. 

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And yet, I was encouraged that, unlike my sadness, it was an emotion I could control. Indeed, one I could even inflict on others. 

 

It was a brilliant new marketing strategy I’d devised! Sad, quiet, invisible woman — now with NEW added rage! From there I released my Bereaved 2.0. A short time later it was flying off the shelves . . .