Larger Than Life (Novella) Read online

  When I get to my cottage, I tie the elephant to the wooden post of the porch. My door faces the bush (another stroke of luck), so someone walking by will not immediately be faced with the reality of a calf hitched up like a horse at a saloon. I dash inside, making a quick inventory of the food I have in my small pantry. Stale crackers, processed cheese, a bag of almonds, a ginger beer. Nothing that would help the calf. I can hear her stomping around, knocking against the post. I stick my head out, and she stops. “You need to be quiet,” I whisper. I put my finger up to my lips.

  She lifts her trunk and blows a raspberry.

  “Stay here,” I say, and I slip silently down the path to the office we researchers share. In addition to our computers and research logs, there is a ratty couch and a few armchairs that have coughed out their stuffing.

  I hesitate at the door, peeking to see Anya, another researcher, dealing cards to Lou, who has been here longer than anyone. Taking a deep breath, I step inside.

  Anya looks up first. “Where have you been?”

  “Battery died on the Land Rover,” I say.

  “So you walked back?” She whistles. “You’re either very brave or very stupid.”

  You have no idea, I think. I was traveling with what any big cat would consider an appetizer.

  “You want to be dealt in?” Paul asks.

  “No, I’m wiped out,” I say. I start rummaging through the cabinets where we keep our coffee supplies. There are sugar packets, which have caked into tiny bricks in the humidity, and pods of instant coffee. But the tin that contains our powdered milk is empty. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I mutter.

  Anya glances at me. “I know, it sucks. The shipment was due in two days ago. I’d tell you the coffee’s not so bad black, but I’d be totally lying.”

  “Son-of-a-bitch,” I say, smacking my hands on the counter.

  Anya and Paul exchange a glance. “Maybe you should switch to herbal tea,” Anya suggests.

  I don’t respond, just grab the wine bottle where it sits on the table between them. Back at my cottage, I leave the door open so that the elephant can watch me as I dump the remaining liquid into the sink and rinse the bottle as best I can. She bleats, loud enough for me to freeze to see if anyone else has heard her. When no one comes running, I fill the empty bottle with water and add a few drops of corn syrup two years past its expiration date that was left in the pantry of the hut by my predecessor. Glucose would have been better, but this is a decent substitute.

  The calf stares at me as I lift the bottle and try to tilt it into her mouth. She turns her head and knocks me down sideways, so that the bottle goes spinning and half its contents spill.

  This time I try lifting her trunk to mimic the way she would be standing if she were nursing from her mother. Her mouth opens, but when I attempt to pour the sweetened water into her mouth, she chokes and backs away. Then she arches her trunk beneath my arm, jerking her head, as if I could nurse her.

  With my hands on my hips, I survey my tiny living space. I soak one of my T-shirts with the water and wring it into the calf’s mouth, which works—but she knocks me over in an effort to get more, faster. Determined, I tear apart my dresser drawers and my closet. I find a hot water bottle and a funnel. Then I spy the rubber gloves beneath my sink. I slip them onto my hands and scrub like I am a surgeon, trying to wash away any residue of cleaning fluid. I slip the neck of a glove over the wine bottle.

  I need a rubber band, but I don’t have one. All of the secretarial supplies are in the office. I reach into my pocket, looking for a hair elastic, and instead touch the telegram from this morning.

  Just like that, I can’t breathe.

  The calf bellows loud enough for the lights to come on in the cabin beside mine. I freeze.

  But no one comes forward from the darkness, and the only sound is the monkeys in the trees, passing judgment. I reach into my other pocket for the hair tie and wrap it tight around the glove to form a makeshift nipple. With a pocketknife, I punch a hole into the tip of one of the fingers. Then I tilt the bottle upside down, so that the calf can suckle.

  She does. The sweetened water runs down her chin and her chest as she draws on the teat of the rubber glove. I refill the bottle three times. My hands grow sticky; my arm aches as I hold the bottle in place. The calf drinks like there’s no tomorrow. Like I’m all she’s got.

  My mother could have been a truly brilliant scientist, and she never passed up the opportunity to tell me so. But she was also unusually beautiful, which undercut her chances of being taken seriously as a college student in her day. Her white shoulders, her jet-black hair, and her violet eyes called to mind a young Elizabeth Taylor, and left her single and pregnant with the child of her very married biology professor. She did not finish at Mount Holyoke but dropped out to have me.

  I did not know this as a child, of course. When I started asking about my father, she came home one day from work with a photograph. The man in the frame was young, smiling, and looked nothing like me. The photo had been in her locker, she said, but now she kept it on a shelf in the living room. It wasn’t until I was thirteen and desperate for any clue written on the back that I slid the picture from beneath the glass and realized it was just a head shot of a model that had come with the frame. I confronted my mother, and that’s when she told me the truth: If not for me, her life would have been considerably different.

  For a few years, I had an almost-stepfather named Isaac. He cooked me pancakes in the morning in the shapes of my initials, and he sat beside me at the kitchen table when I was struggling through long division. It’s funny; in all my memories of Isaac, it’s just the two of us, and my mother isn’t around. When he moved away to live with his best friend, Frank, I didn’t realize it was because he’d fallen for someone my mother could never be. But if I even hinted at missing Isaac, my mother would walk out of the room.

  After Isaac, I never saw my mother date—not in all the years I was growing up—although there were plenty of men who flirted with her. There was Louie, who ran the meat counter at the grocery store. There was my middle school principal, who kept suggesting I was having adjustment issues, although I got straight A’s, simply so that my mother would have to schedule appointments with him. I even had a high school boyfriend who broke up with me because he said he found it too distracting that I had a hot mom. My mother, however, never showed an iota of interest. I assume she felt betrayed by my father, by Isaac. I would have felt sorry for her, being alone for so long, if she hadn’t used this as yet another cross she had to bear in the long litany of Things She Had Given Up for Me.

  She took jobs far beneath her intellectual level, because she had no college degree. She was a receptionist at a dental office, a telemarketer, a meter maid. On the other hand, she pushed me to be the academic she had wanted to be. She was militaristic in her overseeing of my studying. She bought me SAT prep books as Christmas gifts. She visited colleges for me and summarily crossed them off my list if she didn’t feel they would turn me into the groundbreaking scientist she wanted me to become. When I was a high school junior and a local college gave me a book award for my academic excellence, she dismissed it. She scoffed, They’re just trying to get you to apply. They’d kill to have someone like you. I reveled in the attention and her backhanded compliments—because for my mother, that passed for affection. She claimed to only want the best for me, but what I did was never good enough. She had not gotten the chance to live her life the way she wanted, and so she was apparently going to live mine.

  Vassar was one school that met her stringent requirements for excellence in academia and my requirements for an energized, engaged student body. My mother agreed it was a good match. I’m sure it also helped that although the school was now coed, it had a long-standing reputation of producing powerful women graduates in the deafening absence of men. I spent four years studying biopsychology, got perfect scores on my GREs, and was already admitted to Harvard for a doctoral program before my graduation da