Zoology

My interview was at one o’clock, but I walked up to the zoo early to look around. I’d been there once, on a trip to New York with Dad when I was seven, but I didn’t remember anything about the zoo except that it was raining then and that outside the gate a guy in a bright green suit kept wanting to wrap his python around my neck. I also remember Uncle Jacob, who we stayed with that week, telling me that the animals all looked “wretched.” But today it was the sort of day when people talk about the weather without seeming like they have nothing to say, sunny with a few popcorn clouds, and even homeless people looking healthy, almost. The path into the park smelled like something sweet that could have been either pollen or pee.

In a tunnel past the ice-cream vendors, a bald Asian man sat with his legs crossed on a stool, playing a bendy-sounding instrument that only had one string. I stood listening for a minute, and there wasn’t anything you’d walk away humming, but if you listened long enough, it started to sound like a lonely old woman singing. I put all the change I had in his case, and right away he stood up smiling and held out his instrument to me. Did he think I wanted to buy it? Borrow it? I was wearing one of my new shirts and David’s gray pants, so he might have thought I was a banker looking for a hobby. He kept shaking the bow at me, grinning bigger and bigger each time, but he wouldn’t say a word. “No, thanks,” I said. “You sound really good, I’m going to go.” And so I just walked away—feeling not much better than if I’d robbed him—while he stood there shaking his instrument at me and smiling.

A sleepy black guard let me into the zoo for free when I told him I was here for an interview, and just past the entrance was a tank and a sign that said, WATCH OUR SEA LIONS HAVE LUNCH! Kids were clustered around the glass, throwing popcorn in the water or struggling while their parents smeared suntan lotion on their faces. The sea lions—I coultank and a sign that said,d see four of them—had huge bright eyes, long whiskers, and skin like a wet suit. The tank smelled like fish and chemicals, and was as big as a swimming pool, shaped like a stop sign. In the middle was a tall island of brown rocks, and a couple of the sea lions lay there in the sun. There was just a short glass wall between me and the ones who were swimming. I could have dipped my hand in the water—with a little work I could have dipped my body in the water. Another sea lion was up there on a rock now, his skin still wet and dark, but if you stood watching for a minute you could see the light spread over his fur. A red-haired girl in a stroller next to me pointed at the water and said to her bored nanny, “Look! Look! Look!” Swimming sideways, a sea lion would shoot around the edges of the tank, one little flick of its flippers every time the tank’s wall changed direction, its belly out to the crowd, the smoothest swimming I’d ever seen. It hardly even made a ripple. It would spin slowly while it swam, and a lip of water just above it would spill out onto the ground. Every now and then it would have to come up for a breath, but really it didn’t look like it was any harder for the sea lion to swim than it was for me to stand there watching it.

One of the ones up on a rock, because he was too hot or maybe just because he saw how much fun his friend was having, decided to plop back in. He moved like a handicapped person who’d fallen out of his wheelchair—until he was in the water, where he could have been an Olympic swimmer. I hung around the tank for about forty-five minutes, sitting on a bench watching and trying to read a zoo brochure I’d picked up, but the sun was so bright that the pages kept looking blank.

Once I’d been sitting there for a while, a skinny zookeeper with thick glasses came up to the tank and rested her bucket of fish on the bench right next to me. She looked about forty years old, with straight brown hair and careful makeup—if it weren’t for the fish and the uniform, she would have looked more like a lawyer than a zookeeper. “Hi,” I said. “Do you work here? I’ve got an interview in a little bit to be a keeper. Is it a pretty good place to work?”

For a second she looked so confused, almost panicked, that I thought she might not speak English. But she was just considering her answer. “Oh, it’s very rewarding. You have to really love animals, but if you do, you hardly even notice the other stuff.” She gave a nervous smile, like she might have said too much, and walked off with her bucket toward the crowd.

The sun was just above us now, and I lowered my head to let it reach all over. A job like this might even beat playing music, I kept thinking. I’d put on a bathing suit in the mornings and jump in the tank, race the sea lions around the edge, hang on their flippers, then lie up on the rocks with my eyes shut while I dried off. A group of pretty girls would walk over to me (I imagined them visiting from somewhere like Tennessee, giggly and polite), and they’d ask how long it had taken to get the sea lions to trust me. I’d smile, sitting up, and ask if they wanted to come in. And even if the job was nothing like that at all, at least I’d be earning money that didn’t feel like just another version of allowance. At least I wouldn’t be measuring out my days in forty-four-minute chunks, listening to the same five songs fumbled in exactly the same places while Dad kept time on his leg.

Before I knew it I’d drifted off in the sweaty-faced way I sometimes do in the sun, and when a stroller wheeling against my foot woke me up, it was two minutes before one.

* * *

In a brown, empty office, a man with a fat neck nodded hi without shaking my hand and pointed me to a wobbly table. His name tag said paul. He couldn’t have been older than twenty-five, but he acted like I was a student and he was a busy, disappointed principal. By the time we’d sat down, I’d already decided—for whatever reasons we rush to this kind of feeling—that Paul was my enemy. He wore an outfit like a Jurassic Park ranger and stared past me with his forehead wrinkled. His clothes had the sour, bready smell of saltines. “So. Tell me why a job at the Central Park Zoo appeals to you.”

I told him about all the pets I’d had growing up, about watching the keepers in the D.C. zoo wash an elephant. Everything I said just seemed to hang there, waiting for me to take it back. He played with his key chain while I told him, struggling to come up with the word hidden, about how I used to give Olive her pills stuck in a ball of cream cheese.

“All right. I’m going to tell you a little about the job, then you’re going to ask me some questions.” He hunched over and lowered his voice. “If we hire you, you’d be working in the Children’s Zoo, and you wouldn’t get moved to Main unless you stayed for probably over a year. We always start people in Children’s so they get some offstage experience. It’s not a nine-to-five, Monday-to-Friday thing. Your off days are scattered depending on the schedule, and if something needs to get done, you stay until it’s finished. And there’s not much glamour to it. I tell everyone who comes in, if you think it’s going to be like the Discovery Channel, then you should walk out right now.” I made a face like I thought it was funny that some people thought it was going to be like the Discovery Channel. “It’s dirty work, and you’ve got to be out there all day if it’s snowing, raining, a hundred degrees, thirty degrees, whatever. The animals always need to be taken care of. I’ve had too many people here who’re good as long as the weather’s nice, but it starts raining and suddenly I can’t find anybody.”

Together we walked over to the Children’s Zoo, with Paul staying a few steps ahead of me, and when we passed the Asian man (who was sobbing with his instrument again) I kept my eyes down. Once we were through the gates, Paul said, “Children’s is shaped like a doughnut, farm animals on the ring, aviary in the middle.” His walkie-talkie kept buzzing while we walked, and he’d flip it out of its holster and say quick, military things to whoever was on the other end: “Children’s one to base, fifteen thirty at animal Main. Over.”

The first animal he introduced me to was Othello, the black bull. He smelled oily, and he lived alone in a pen that looked too small for him. When he saw us he grunted and walked up to the fence. You could see his muscles move under his skin. His nose was shiny with some clear goo, and his eyes, as big as pool balls, looked hungry and worn-out. To show how good I was with animals, I reached over and scratched him on the flat, bony place between his ears. He butted my hand away, and Paul said, “Othello’s probably the rowdiest animal here—he doesn’t know his own strength, and he gets jumpy with men sometimes. Don’t ever turn your back on him.”

Through a tunnel in a plastic tree came a group of little kids, all black, all wearing green T-shirts that said, summer is for learning. None of the noise—the talking, the squealing, the laughing—seemed to come from any one kid.

“It’ll be like this every day. Three to five camp groups at once.” In front of the sheep pen, a fat zookeeper with bushy eyebrows was saying, “No. No. No,” to a group of Asian kids in pink shirts.

Paul moved like a cowboy-bear. Leading me around the ring, past the alpacas and the sheep, he said, “Here’s Lily. Back there in the shed’s Chili. They’re potbellied pigs.” The sight, at first, is like the kind of fat person you see on the subway who takes up three seats: You stare at them not quite believing they live entire lives in those bodies. Lily and Chili’s stomachs scraped on the ground every time they took a step. Folds of fat covered their eyes and hung down from their cheeks. They looked miserable under all that, trapped. I reached over and petted Lily, and her hair, black against all that tough black skin, felt like the wires in a pot scrubber. “She’s been overeating, so something you’d have to be very careful of is Lily eating Chili’s food. She loves pushing him around.” Lily grunted when I touched her, and it could have meant, “Help!” or it could have meant, “More!”

A purple thundercloud was hurrying toward us, and when it started to rain a minute later, big, slappy drops, I pretended not to notice the water on my glasses so Paul would know that I wasn’t a complainer.

As we came through the screen door into where all the birds lived, it sounded like we were suddenly hundreds of miles from the city. The air felt thick from the mulch, and full of plant smell. “Right up there are the magpies. Those two are getting ready to mate, so we’re trying to make sure they have everything they need.” I couldn’t see anything, but I made nodding noises. “We have three doves sitting on nests right now, so every afternoon you’ll have to go around and count them and make sure everyone’s here and the nests are OK. This is the chukar partridge, Chuck.” A fat, striped bird waddled by, as uninterested in us as we were in the trees we walked past. “He’s had a thing with his balance for the past few weeks, so we’re trying him on a special diet, and he’s spending every other day in the dispensary. You have to keep an eye on him and write down what he’s doing every morning.” On either side of the bridge we stood on was green water, and ducks with wild colors and paddling feet zoomed underneath us.

Finally, in the pen closest to the exit, I met the goats. There were seven. “That little one’s Suzy. She’s the mom. Her kids are Pearl, there, and Onyx, who’s over there with the gray spot. Sparky’s up on the stump, Spanky’s this one—he’s trouble—Scooter’s asleep right there with the long beard, and that,” he said, pointing to the tall white one, the only one without horns, “is Newman. He’s a Nubian. Totally different species. He’s a big goof. One of the security guards calls him Jar Jar, because of the ears.” The goats looked smart and scrappy, a gang of cartoon grouches and goofballs. Their pupils went the wrong way, and they all looked up at me expecting something—they were the Bad News Bears and I was their new coach. Newman came right over, nibbled at my collar, then rested his head on my shoulder and took a loud breath. He had big pink nostrils and little square teeth. He smelled like dust and hay. His ears hung below his chin, and he looked—with his barrel of a body on top of those long, skinny legs—like a little kid’s drawing of a horse. The Summer Learners came around the bend with their hands full of food, and Newman scrambled to get in position, his front hooves in the mesh of the fence, his neck leaning way over, and his head bouncing from hand to hand.

“He’s just a big kid, always hungry,” Paul said, and that’s when, with a quick bob, Newman lifted the glasses off my face. Paul jumped the fence and grabbed a handful of Newman’s neck hair, then wiped my glasses on his shorts before he handed them back. “He’s terrible sometimes. I’ll make a note for him not to get Enrichment this afternoon. Usually, something like that happens, you’ve got to fill out a report. Last month he broke some woman’s camera, we had to pay two hundred bucks.”

I still haven’t fixed the scratch on my glasses’ left lens. He snuffled the food from a row of girls’ hands, snuffled them again to make sure he hadn’t missed anything, then lifted his head before bobbing off down the line.

* * *

When Paul called Monday afternoon to offer me the job, I decided to go for a celebration walk, and while I was looking for a place to get an egg-and-cheese sandwich, I realized I was right by David’s hospital on Fifty-first. Long escalators led up to a busy lobby with a gift shop full of flowers and silvery balloons. A week before I would have felt uneasy in a place like that, suspicious that everyone who walked past was wondering why I wasn’t at work. But I felt now like a businessman paying a visit to a friend, full of easy braggy charm.

In the elevator I only noticed that I was humming because of how the nurse was staring at me.

David’s face—like mine but wider and flatter, like a cow’s—can’t hide anything, and he wasn’t glad to see me. For some reason he shook my hand. “Good to see you. Just stopping by? What’s up?”

“I can come back later.”

“No, I’m sorry, it’s just hectic here. I’m an hour behind on my afternoons and I’ve gotta get somebody’s lecture notes for this morning. I’m about to see a nice kid now, though. You wanna come sit in? I’ll tell her you’re a first-year.”

She walked into the office wearing shorts and carrying a folder, and she did seem nice, but to tell the truth I could hardly look at her. There wasn’t a spot on her face that wasn’t covered in acne, a Halloween mask she could never take off. David shook her hand without wincing, and she hopped up on the table, swinging her legs and crinkling the paper.

“Your chin’s looking better,” he said, “and it’s a lot less angry up here around the temples and the hairline. How many milligrams do we have you taking now?”

“A hundred.” It was strange to hear a little girl’s voice come out of that face, like expecting milk and getting orange juice.

“I think we’re going to step it up to one-twenty for the next two weeks. This is Henry; Henry, this is Joan. Henry here’s at NYU, hoping to be a dermatologist himself.” He stuffed his tongue in his top lip to keep from smiling.

“I want to be a doctor,” she said, looking at me now. “Either an open-heart surgeon or the person who helps with babies.”

“She designed the entire Web site for her school. One of the most talented people I’ve seen,” David said. “And within six months we’re going to get her all cleared up and she’s going to be one of the most beautiful people I’ve seen too.”

She smiled and seemed so brave, so patient and gentle about living with her face, that I hated myself for being disgusted by her.

David has never had more than ten pimples in his life, but he’s always been a fanatic about his skin. When we were growing up he was full of weird ideas: olive oil and sugar, Aqua Velva, ice water—his routine before he’d go to bed used to take half an hour, but I don’t think he would have had any pimples if he’d wiped once with a wet rag and eaten nothing but chocolate cake. I wasn’t so lucky. From the time I was in eighth grade until a couple of years ago, I didn’t have a single day where I woke up and my face looked the way I wanted it to. Every night I’d smear on the creams and swallow the pills that Dr. Fordham, nutty in his toupee, would send me home with each month, but I may as well have prayed or done a skin dance. In the morning I’d stand in front of my bathroom mirror and with however many fingers it took I’d cover the biggest pimples of the day and think, Like this you wouldn’t look so bad at all. On the worst days, Dad, who had bad acne when he was in high school and still has scooped-out-looking scars on his chin, would say, glancing over while he drove me to school, “You’re a very handsome kid.”

When the girl left, the office secretary, a fat woman with braces and heavy makeup, said, “Stephen Takas just called and canceled, and Dr. Harrison’s just come back in, so you’ve got about forty minutes if you want to take lunch. Now, is this your brother? Why haven’t I been introduced?”

“Laura Ann, Henry; Henry, Laura Ann. This is the famous secretary who can balance her checkbook and do a month’s schedules and talk to two people on the phone, all at once.”

She blushed and looked down at her lap. Like he was already a big-shot doctor, David rapped his knuckles on her counter and said, “We’re gonna go around the corner. What can I bring you back?”

“Nothing for me, I’m having cottage cheese,” she said. “Here, Mona, come meet Dr. Elinsky’s brother. Henry, this is my niece.”

From a back room full of file cabinets stepped a girl who looked my age. Tan with blond hair pulled into a ponytail and a tight white T-shirt and a big smile. If I could get close enough I was sure she’d smell like warm laundry. “Hi there,” she said.

“Can we bring you anything, Mona?” David said. There was something about the way he didn’t quite look at her when he said it.

“No thanks.” And something about the way she didn’t look at him. “I was just about to leave for the day.”

David took me into a pizza place on Fiftieth. He asked me about the zoo, what I’d be doing, how much I’d be getting paid, but all I could think about was Mona. The idea that girls like her lived in the same world as girls like the one with acne—that girls like her lived in the same world as me—filled me with bright, itchy panic, like there was something crucial I’d missed doing years ago.

A crumpled old man was working behind the counter, opening and closing the ovens. There was something wrong with his hands—arthritis, maybe. He held them and used them almost like they were paddles. “How you doing today, pops?” David said in a voice I’d never heard him use.

“I’m not dead, and if you can say that, how bad a day can it be?”

David laughed hard and patted the old man on the shoulder while he paid.

“This place is great, huh?” he said when we sat down, but my slice wasn’t much better than the pizza I’d been getting at Somerset. “Silvio opened it when he was thirty-two, and he hasn’t been gone for more than two days since. A doctor told me he ratted on his brother in Florence and sent him to jail. I keep meaning to ask him about it when it’s not so crowded.”

I couldn’t figure out how to ask about Mona, but I had to know more about her. So I said, “Mona’s pretty, huh?”

“Mona?” But he flared his nostrils and had to really work not to grin. “She is pretty. I guess I haven’t thought about her like that.”

“How could you not think about her like that? She’s as pretty as a model.”

“I just … I don’t know—things in the office are a little strange.”

“What things?”

“Nothing. Enough. Tell me more about work. When do you start?”

“Just tell me what’s strange.” I knew how I was acting, but I didn’t care.

“Mona’s one of these people who gets a lot of crushes. She’s just young. How old are you now?”

“Eighteen.”

“Jesus. I’m not talking about it anymore.” The rest of my slice looked as good to eat as my stack of napkins.

“We don’t have to talk about it, just tell me what you meant. Then I promise I’ll stop.”

“No.” He put his big soft hand on my arm and looked right into my eyes like I was a mental patient. “No.” Once he’d decided I got it, he said, “Listen, I’d been meaning to talk about something anyway. Really Lucy’s been bugging me about it, just a couple of little things about staying with us—”

Had Mona seen David’s facial hair? Since he was fourteen he’d had to shave twice a day, and still he had a five-o’clock shadow by two o’clock. I once walked in on him in the bathroom with shaving cream all over his shoulders.

In high school he was the manager of the JV baseball team, and he never went to a single school dance, not even after Mom said she’d ground him if he didn’t ask someone. But while he worked in his room at night—when he was chubby and seventeen and I was chubbier and nine—I sat on the floor for as long as he’d let me, listening to his stories, mostly about the guys on the team.

“Seth and Pete screwed Carrie Feldman on the hood of Seth’s car, right in the parking lot. All three of them buck naked.” My penis would almost tear through my pajamas. “Last weekend Jon went to a place on N Street, and for ten bucks a Korean girl let him rub her all over with hot oil.” I’d throw tantrums when Mom would come in to make me go to bed. Just one more minute. Thirty more seconds. David sitting there muttering while he stapled packets at his desk was better than any TV show.

One night in his freshman year at Emory, when I was in fifth grade, he called home to talk to me. “I’m in trouble,” he said, almost whispering. “Big, big trouble. I’ve seriously never felt this bad. Everybody said it was going to be so different. But it’s not. It’s the exact same fucking thing.”

I wouldn’t have been any more terrified if he’d told me he had a brain tumor. I kept it secret from Mom and Dad, and I called him the next day, hiding in the bathroom with the portable phone crackling. After thirty seconds he said he had to run because his friends were leaving for a Braves game, and he never talked about feeling bad again. When we visited him that spring, he took me to a party at his frat, and I ended up playing Sonic the Hedgehog in the messiest bedroom I’ve ever seen with a guy with a yarmulke and a red beard.

While we dumped our crusts, he said, without looking at me, “What’s happening with you and girls, by the way?”

“I had something at home, but, you know, just looking around.” (Mona, we could play barefoot Frisbee in the park.)

“Nothing wrong with that,” he said. (I’d put suntan lotion on your shoulders, leave love notes on your side of the bed.)

Out on the street he puffed out his cheeks, glanced down at his watch, and said, “Time to get back to it.” He shook my hand again, squinting in the light, and said, “Look. Don’t worry too much about Lucy. Bottom line: I’m enjoying having you live with us, and it’s my place as much as it’s hers.”

In the elevator after one of my first days at work, Sameer asked me, sounding shy, if I liked to play Ping-Pong. He and Janek, the tall doorman from Slovakia, played every day on the seventh floor, next to the laundry room, with broken paddles and a baggy net and only one ball that wasn’t cracked. In middle school, before one of David’s friends jumped on our basement table and snapped two of the legs, I used to play most afternoons with Dad. We didn’t keep score—Dad said, smiling, that he didn’t like the idea of beating me. I kept score myself, though, and by eighth grade I beat him at least as often as he beat me. But now I couldn’t seem to remember how I used to grip the paddle, and my backhand wouldn’t stay on the table.

“Yesterday,” Sameer said, while we rallied, “I read a fascinating article in a magazine in the doctor’s office. In Elizabeth, New Jersey, there is a man who funds his life and his exorbitant family merely by the sale of his own hair.” The sounds of the game were as steady as a metronome. Janek sat in a chair by the door, picking at the rubber skin on his paddle. “This man has been blessed with the most lustrous and healthful hair that doctors have ever seen, and when he sells a full head of it—a head of hair more beautiful than Daryl Hannah’s—he earns for it upward of twenty thousand dollars, and this is hair he produces simply by the existence of his head.”