Animal Wife Read online

  ANIMAL WIFE

  ANIMAL WIFE

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  stories

  Lara Ehrlich

  Red Hen Press | Pasadena, CA

  Animal Wife

  Copyright © 2020 by Lara Ehrlich

  All Rights Reserved

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of both the publisher and the copyright owner.

  Book design by Mark E. Cull

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Ehrlich, Lara, 1981– author.

  Title: Animal wife : stories / Lara Ehrlich.

  Description: First edition. | Pasadena, CA : Red Hen Press, [2020]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020025808 (print) | LCCN 2020025809 (ebook) | ISBN 9781597098847 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781597098830 (epub)

  Classification: LCC PS3605.H7574 A6 2020 (print) | LCC PS3605.H7574 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020025808

  Publication of this book has been made possible in part through the financial support of Ann Beman.

  The National Endowment for the Arts, the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, the Ahmanson Foundation, the Dwight Stuart Youth Fund, the Max Factor Family Foundation, the Pasadena Tournament of Roses Foundation, the Pasadena Arts & Culture Commission and the City of Pasadena Cultural Affairs Division, the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, the Audrey & Sydney Irmas Charitable Foundation, the Kinder Morgan Foundation, the Meta & George Rosenberg Foundation, the Albert and Elaine Borchard Foundation, the Adams Family Foundation, the Riordan Foundation, Amazon Literary Partnership, and the Mara W. Breech Foundation partially support Red Hen Press.

  First Edition

  Published by Red Hen Press

  www.redhen.org

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The stories in this collection first appeared in the following publications, sometimes in slightly different form:

  Boston Literary Magazine: “Kite”; Columbia Review: “Beware the Undertoad”; Fiction Southeast: “Animal Wife Revisited”; F(r)iction: “The Vanishing Point”; HOOT: “Paint by Number”; Hunger Mountain: “Animal Wife”; Literary Orphans Journal: “Stone Fruit”; Massachusetts Review: “Burn Rubber”; Normal School: “Night Terrors”; Paper Darts: “The Tenant”; River Styx: “Six Roses”; SmokeLong Quarterly: “Foresight”; StoryQuarterly: “Desiree the Destroyer”; U.S. 1 Worksheets: “Crush.”

  THANK YOU

  To Immy, the best thing in my life. To Pamela Ehrlich, for always reading me just “one more story.” To Brian Ehrlich, for “Billy Goats Gruff.” And to Brenna Ehrlich Enos, for our childhood. To fearless, fabulous Sophia Macris. To Austin Gilkeson, greatest living Tolkien expert, and Oline Eaton, kindred spirit. To Abby Pekar, Blair Hurley, and Kirsten Arnett, who set the literary bar. To Manuel Gonzales, Liz Bergstrom, Andrew Mitchell, Erin Osborne, Meghan Purvis—and all the Killer Robots to whose strangeness I aspire. To Elizabeth McCracken, Amanda Boldenow, Rickey Fayne, Erica Hussey, Natalie Serber, and Lindsay Tigue for encouraging me to “go full deer.” To Janice Checchio, for ferocity. To the Midwest Writers Workshop, StoryStudio Chicago, Grub Street in Boston, the Tin House Writers’ Workshop, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, Wellspring House in Massachusetts, and the Snowed-in Residency at the Garret on the Green in New York. To the literary magazines that published these stories, and to Ann Hood for choosing Animal Wife. To everyone at Red Hen for their expertise, patience, and excellence, and Erin Harris of Folio Literary Management for unerring guidance. To Karen Chinca, for Immy. To Michelle Andelman, first reader of the pages that became Animal Wife. And to Douglas Riggs—FB—my ideal reader, my ideal everything.

  For my mother. For Pamela.

  For my daughter. For Imogen.

  CONTENTS

  Animal Wife

  Night Terrors

  Beware the Undertoad

  Six Roses

  Desiree the Destroyer

  Crush

  Foresight

  The Vanishing Point

  Kite

  Burn Rubber

  The Tenant

  Paint by Number

  The Monster at Marta’s Back

  Stone Fruit

  Animal Wife Revisited

  In villages where women bore most of the weight of a constricted life, witches flew by night on broomsticks or even on lighter vehicles such as ears of wheat or pieces of straw.

  —Italo Calvino

  ANIMAL WIFE

  My father sits at the kitchen table with his shoulders hunched, staring at a feather cupped in his rough carpenter’s hands. Its barbs are clean and white. The table is bare except for the box that held my mother’s feathered robe. It is still encrusted with dirt. It has no latch, no key. My mother had to bash it open.

  The kitchen is cold, and there is no dinner. Seventh grade ended today, so there is no homework. We sit across from each other in silence. I’m often restless, though I try not to be. “Young ladies should not fidget,” my father always says. I will never be a lady.

  I try not to fidget tonight and even sit up straight. There is dirt under my fingernails. I hide my hands in my lap so my father won’t see, but he has forgotten I’m here. He just stares at the feather and doesn’t say good night when I go upstairs to my room, my stomach growling.

  There is a feather on my pillow. It glows white in the dark, the special kind of dark that makes you worry you’ve gone blind. When I was little and still afraid, my mother would lie with me, telling me story after story. Little girls who fell in love turned into sea foam or wind. They walked as if on knives, kept silent for seven years, wove thistle shirts until their fingers bled. They never learned to leave locked doors alone. Hunters and thieves and kings pursued them, carved out their hearts, scooped out their eyes, and snipped off their tongues. She told her own story like a fairy tale.

  I do not brush my teeth tonight, since she is not here to make me. I cannot hear my father. Maybe he has fallen asleep at the kitchen table. The only sound is the house groaning as it settles.

  My father built this house with his own hands. He learned to build from his father, who learned from his father, who made whaling ships. People came from miles around to watch my great-grandfather erect their giant ribcages on the shore. He sliced the trees into wide planks and laid them side by side. He ran rope between the boards so when they swelled with water, they wouldn’t crack.

  My father makes houses like boats, with wood and rope. He built our house for my mother over the pond where they met. He filled the pond with stones, a foundation for their love.

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  There are scraping noises below my window. It is still dark, but I can just make out my father at the edge of the yard by the woods. He digs up the grass from the back door to the edge of the forest. He digs until our yard is a pit of stones surrounded by mountains of dirt.

  My father thrusts his shovel under each stone and leans on the handle so hard it creaks. Finally, the stone sighs a puff of dirt and my father picks it up, bending his knees and keeping his back straight the way we learned to lift weights in gym class. It was the only useful thing I learned in gym class. He heaves the stones to the side along the tree line until they make a wall around the hole.

  My father does not eat the sandwich I make for him. When I ask what he’s doing, he just shakes his head, so I do not ask again. He doesn’t seem to remember that he signed me up for ballet this summer, and I am not going to remind him. I pack my compass and canteen and slip into the woods.

  My mother used to send me searching for what she called “objects of unexpected beauty,” as though she didn’t expect me to find beauty in
Stone. But it is here, in the wide fields with crisscrossing stone walls—and the stones themselves. They seem so plain at first, but upon closer inspection there are threads of quartz glimmering through the granite. It’s true that there’s only so much to Stone, but I have walked the perimeter exactly 299 times, and I’ve discovered something new each time.

  I used to bring my treasures to my mother—a stuffed bear with one eye, an hourglass with no sand. In the beginning, she pretended to admire my treasures, but as time passed, she stopped looking, until I no longer brought her anything. The box was different. When I offered it to my mother, her hands shook.

  My mother said girls have to take care of themselves. That’s how we avoid turning into sea foam and falling down wells. That’s how we escape hunters and kings who chop and carve and snip and steal. That’s why I practice punching every afternoon.

  I got my boxing pad from Old Billy Brick, who works at the deli counter. The veins on the backs of his hands bulge like roots. He was a boxer, and his knuckles are calloused from breaking noses. I like to stare at them while he carefully slices the deli meat. One day, I will have hands like his.

  There is a nail on the side of the house where I can hang my pad at punching level. The ground is eroded at the base of the wall here, like gums worn away at a tooth’s root. The box was wedged between two exposed foundation stones. I dug for an hour to free it.

  I do one hundred punches on one side, then a hundred more on the other. The first few weeks of training, my arms ached after twenty punches. Then fifty. Then seventy-five. Now I have calluses on the first two knuckles of each hand.

  My father does not like the calluses. He says my bones are still growing. He does not understand that I have to take care of myself. “That’s my job,” he says, while he combs the tangles from my hair.

  He has not combed my hair since the night before last, and the tangles may never come out. He has been digging without rest. His palms are blistered and bleeding. He’s tired, but he is not weak. When Paul Cooper pushed me into the deep end and I couldn’t make it to the edge, my father dragged me out. He threatened to kill Paul if he ever touched me again. Paul tripped me in gym the next day, but I didn’t tell my father. I just punched him in the stomach, and he hasn’t bothered me since.

  When my knuckles are sore, I make my three-hundredth journey around Stone. It feels like time should have stopped when my mother left, but the town continues without us. People go about their lives, shopping for groceries and discussing car repairs in loud voices. The sidewalks and shop windows are too bright, as if it’s just rained.

  I return to the dirt and the stone walls and my father’s silence. I help dig.

  Digging is useful. I can feel my muscles tearing and reknitting stronger than before. I pretend I’m searching for treasure. I find a trove of shells that gleam in the sun. I find a skeleton with wing bones folded tight around a hollow heart space. The swan’s long notched neck is graceful even in death.

  My father won’t let me keep it. He lifts it with his shovel and deposits it gently in the woods.

  When the wall of stones has reached my waist, my father pries up a rock, and the earth below it becomes wet, the way blood wells up after a tooth is pulled. He shouts, and I drop my shovel. He spins me in circles, slipping in the mud. He has never had trouble lifting me before. His eyes are wide and his mouth is open as if he might laugh.

  He digs with renewed purpose, though he won’t say why. Blood runs down the shovel handle. I help him dig into the damp space, and by evening a pocket of what used to be our backyard is filled with water.

  My father is still digging when I go up to bed without brushing my teeth. I haven’t brushed them in three days, since my mother left. I lie on top of the sheets, guarding my treasures. It is too hot to sleep, and the shovel scrapes below my window.

  Sometimes, when my mother didn’t feel like telling stories, she would ask what I wanted to be when I grow up. An archaeologist. Geologist. Anthropologist. “What else?” she asked. Architect. Historian. “What else?”

  She would lament that she had never accomplished anything, except having me. She wanted to be an artist, but had nothing to paint. My father suggested art classes at the community college, but the house would fall apart without her, she said.

  She’d lie in bed beside me in the dark, and as she drew one finger between my eyes, she’d say, “You are the best thing in my life.”

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  My father is asleep on the steps with his head resting against the house. His legs are outstretched, his feet submerged in the pond that has engulfed our backyard. His face is tipped to the sun. His nose is peeling, and his cheeks are shadowed with stubble. When I sit beside him, he drags his eyes open, as if they are made of iron.

  “Now she’ll come home.” His voice is rusty.

  My father knows better than that. He knows my mother’s stories as well as I do. One task is not enough to win her back. He must move a mountain with a silver spoon. Or plant an orchard in a single day. And when he finally finds my mother, he must keep his arms around her, even when she turns into a viper or fire or cloud of wasps. He must prove he deserves her.

  The totems that guide a hero along a magical quest are as elusive as breadcrumbs. Knotholes disguise entries to other worlds. Wooden shoes take the hero bounding across the ocean. I keep my powers of observation sharp so I won’t miss something and end up spitting toads.

  Armed with my compass and canteen, and my mother’s feather in a pouch around my neck, I scour the woods for enchantments. While my father is resting, I will discover the next task. It’s my fault she left, after all.

  I’m concentrating so hard I trip over the swan skeleton tangled in a nest of vines. Its neck bones have tumbled into a heap. They are smooth, as if worn by waves. I arrange them like a puzzle, except for the one I slip into my pouch with the feather.

  A pebble glances off the top of my head, and a boy laughs in the branches.

  “Who are you?” he calls down to me.

  “Alex.”

  “That’s a boy’s name.”

  “No, it isn’t. It’s short for Alexandra.”

  He looks at me thoughtfully, without blinking.

  “I’m Amir,” he says. “You can come up, if you want.”

  I don’t need his permission, but I’m good at climbing trees. I know just where to put my feet. The light sifts through the branches as though I’m underwater, climbing toward the sun.

  Amir slides back on his branch to let me sit beside him.

  “Most girls can’t climb that well,” he says.

  His voice rises and falls. I know all about how boys’ voices fly out of their control, which must be embarrassing.

  “They could if they trained.”

  He raises one eyebrow, as if he’s practiced in front of the mirror.

  I can see everything from here: my father’s pond, my father on the steps, the road running out to the highway. I can see all the secrets in a town that says it has no secrets.

  “Did you hear about the bear bullet?” Amir asks. “Last week on I-90, two cars were driving from opposite directions, both going about eighty miles an hour—”

  “Is this a math problem?” It’s rude to interrupt, but I don’t like math. I don’t like questions about two trains coming from opposite directions and what time they would reach the station. In the real world, you’d just check the train schedule.

  “Two cars were coming from opposite directions,” he says, as if he hadn’t heard me, “and a bear came loping out of the woods. “One car hit it and sent it flying like a bullet right through the windshield of the other car. Whack!” He slams his palms together. “A bear bullet.”

  “Was the bear okay?”

  “Of course not.”

  His smugness is annoying, but my father says it’s not polite for a young lady to point out other people’s faults, especially when she has so many of her own.

  “Have I upset you?” He looks a little
nervous, as if I might cry. So, I tell him one of my mother’s stories, about the Marsh King who dragged a maiden down into the black mud to be his bride.

  A smile cracks across his face. He unwinds a rope from the trunk, and a basket descends from the branches. He is well fortified. There are other ropes leading to a box of cookies, a flashlight, a bucket of rocks he calls missiles. He even has a net to trap intruders. He says I’m lucky he didn’t use his net on me because he made it himself and it’s strong enough to capture a full-grown man. He could live up here, if he had to.

  Across the pond, my father stands and steadies himself against the house. His ribs poke through his shirt. He rubs his eyes with the heels of his palms like a little boy, but no one would dare pity him.

  “What’s wrong with him?” Amir asks, his eyes gentle with concern, as if he pities me.

  “Nothing’s wrong with him.” I have my father’s temper. My eyes bug out and a vein in my forehead twitches like a worm on a hook. Sometimes, I make myself mad on purpose, just to watch my face change.

  “We’re on a quest, and you’re wasting my time.” I shove back on the branch so fast I overturn one of his baskets, and missiles rain to the ground. Amir grabs my wrist.

  “I’m sorry,” he says, his voice soaring out of his reach. “If you tell me about it, I can help. I can teach you to make nets and launch missiles.”

  His fingers are hot. His eyes are green. My mother warned me not to trust boys; they will take what they want without asking. But Amir can’t take anything from me. I have calluses on my knuckles and scabs on my knees. I’ve made it to 110 punches without getting tired.

  “I don’t need help.” I leap from the tree.

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  This is the story my father tells: He was putting a roof on Old Billy Brick’s house. You can see everything from a roof, like how the forest around Stone goes on forever. You can see all the secrets in a town that says it has no secrets.