Thomas Pierce - Hall of Small Mammals - Stories

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.