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
y.

  On the night following the ceremony, my mother came to my senior off-campus apartment with a bottle of Dom Pérignon Oenothèque Rosé. “Do you know what this is?” she asked.

  “Champagne?”

  “A thousand-dollar bottle of champagne,” she corrected.

  I thought of all that could be bought with a thousand dollars. “Can you return it?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “It’s priceless. Like my daughter.”

  Her words were like sun on a patch of ice; I could immediately feel myself softening at the edges. I watched her twist the wire cage at the neck of the bottle and pop the cork, so that the pink bubbles frothed over her hand.

  She poured two glasses—into juice cups, because that was all I had—and toasted me. “You know what they say—you can always tell a Vassar girl … but you can’t tell her much.”

  I didn’t want to speak. I was afraid I’d break the spell, whatever this magic might be. So I sipped from my glass as my mother drained hers. I could feel her eyes settling on me, not with pride but as if she were checking me over for quality control.

  “What?” I said, uncomfortable.

  “I’m just wondering,” my mother said. “Why don’t you wear any makeup?”

  I had seen my mother without her “face” only once—the day after Isaac left. It was terrifying—the pale palette of her cheeks, the red gash of her mouth, the streaks of mascara.

  “Is it because you think you’re so pretty you don’t need it?” she mused. “Or is it some kind of statement?”

  I blinked at her. I didn’t wear makeup because usually I rolled out of bed ten minutes before class, after having stayed up studying till 4:00 A.M. I didn’t wear makeup because I’d been trained my whole life to focus on my brains and not my looks. But maybe that had been a trap laid by my mother.

  “It doesn’t matter how I look to my research subjects,” I said. At Harvard, I would be working with monkeys. I was pretty sure I’d be the best-looking one in the lab no matter how grungy I got.

  My mother didn’t say anything. She just raised her brows, sniffed, and took another sip of champagne.

  Her criticism boiled at the back of my throat, bitter and hot, and I threw my verbal punch blindly: “Maybe I should start wearing some makeup. Maybe I should have tried harder to attract some guy who could get me knocked up,” I said. “Just like you.”

  My mother stared at me for a long moment. Then she got up, carried the bottle to the kitchen sink, and spilled the remainder down the drain. “You know,” she said, her back to me, “this wasn’t as good as I’d hoped.”

  We both knew she was not talking about the wine.

  After making a nest for the elephant with one blanket and wrapping her in another, I fall into a deep, exhausted sleep. I dream that Anya comes looking for me, to warn me that Grant has found out about the calf and is on a rampage. He is going to tell me that I’ve crossed a line, that I can no longer do my work here. Childishly, I close the door and lock it, thinking that if he cannot get in to deliver the bad news, it won’t be real.

  In my dream, I hear Grant’s footsteps, heavy on the porch.

  I hear him bang at the door. Alice, he says, don’t be ridiculous.

  It is something my mother would say.

  My eyes fly open, and I am suddenly awake. It is still pitch dark out, the moon high. And I realize that Grant is not the source of the steady thump against my door.

  I open it to find the calf on the threshold, getting ready to smack the wood with her trunk again.

  “You can’t come inside,” I say out loud. “I’m already in enough trouble.”

  The calf rumbles.

  “I know you’re hungry. But I can’t do anything else until it’s morning.” I lead the baby elephant back to her nest of blankets. “Sleep tight,” I say.

  I close the door softly and have not even pulled back the covers on my bed before I hear her pounding again.

  It gets cold in the bush when the sun goes down. It’s about 40 degrees Fahrenheit right now. That’s why I’ve given the calf blankets. It’s also why I’m sleeping with my door closed. But now I prop it open with one of my kitchen chairs. “Is that better?” I ask. “I’m right here. You can see me.”

  She tries to walk inside, but the rope keeps her from getting very far.

  “Go to sleep,” I mutter.

  I lie back down, shivering. For a few moments, it’s quiet. But then the calf starts to rumble again. Louder.

  I stare up at the ceiling, count to ten, and throw back the quilt. I untie the rope and lead her inside.

  Insert your own joke here, about the elephant in the room. She may be less than three feet tall, but she does manage to knock over a lamp and a side table and to crush a magazine rack beneath her foot as she follows me inside. I rearrange her blankets beside my bed and let her root around in them. She tosses one into the air like a pizza crust as I lie down again; it lands over her head and she squeals.

  I pull the blanket off her, and she stares at me with what could only be seen as wonder. I think of the concept of object permanence, how even human babies think a thing no longer exists when they can’t see it. “There,” I say. “Better?”

  She lifts her trunk and hoovers along the edge of the bed, over my ankle.

  At some point, I do fall asleep again. I wake when the sun comes up, when the hornbills start their morning gossip. For one blissful moment, I remember none of yesterday. And then I feel it: a tug, a tickle. The calf is half-sprawled across the mattress, sucking on my foot.

  You cannot force a family. I learned this firsthand when I was doing research with the elephants at Madikwe. The translocated youngsters were all roughly the same age. Without a matriarch—a mother figure—they developed behavioral issues that we researchers had never seen.

  In the wild, the older cows chase bulls out of the herd when they get to be about thirteen or fourteen years old. Normally, those teenage bulls then roam in small herds of male elephants, learning from their elders, until they are ready to mate. In Madikwe, however, without older cows to set limits, the young bulls remained in the herd, acting aggressively and forcing themselves on the juvenile females. In normal conditions, a young cow won’t mate till she’s around twelve years old, and she will give birth at age fourteen. She will spend years being a good auntie or sister to the newborn calves, so that when it is her turn to have a baby, she knows what to do. She will have all the guidance and structure she needs to learn how to become a mother.

  In this dysfunctional herd, though, cows were getting pregnant at age eight. Two cows gave birth at age ten. They didn’t know what to do with newborn calves. They didn’t act protectively, like mothers. They didn’t nurture; they didn’t react when the babies cried out. Not long after their birth, a slightly larger female killed both calves, and the mothers didn’t even try to intervene.

  I had initially come to Madikwe to study elephant memory. My postdoctoral research was full of experiments that proved elephants could use smell to differentiate between individuals, to recognize those they had not seen in a long time, and to track those who had traveled a distance away. But I was becoming less interested in the reunions of separated elephants and getting more curious about the forces that prevented them from staying together as a family unit in the first place. I studied the aberrant behavior of the young mothers and wondered if there was more to it than just stress or the lack of a proper hierarchy. They had all seen their own mothers murdered by government hunters during the culls. Could that incident have scarred these young elephants so deeply that they were unable to form meaningful relationships—with others, or with their own offspring?

  By suggesting some sort of pachydermal post-traumatic stress disorder, I knew I was straddling a very fine line between science and anthropomorphism. Science was about magnification—examining an organism in such detail that you understood it on a cellular, biological, evolutionary level. Although it was widely accepted in the field that elephants exh
ibited signs of cognition—studies had proven their mental acuity and memory time and time again—no scientist would go on record to say that these great gray animals felt as deeply as we did. Emotions were not quantifiable—not in humans, and not in elephants. For science to say something was true, it had to be measurable.

  And yet.

  The bond between a mother and a child weighed nothing on a scale; it took up no room in a test tube. But most of us would have a hard time saying it didn’t exist.

  I kept my hunch to myself but put aside my notes on herd migration and instead began filling fresh notebooks with the research I wasn’t supposed to be doing: cataloging the behaviors of elephants in as scientific a way as possible. I was able to record aggressions between elephants. I marked down incidents where juvenile cows turned to an older one for security or comfort and were roundly ignored. And then one day, another unnaturally young female delivered a calf and deliberately stepped on top of him.

  This time, a bush vet intervened, and I volunteered to accompany him as he treated the calf’s injuries. The newborn’s hind leg was broken; even in a wild herd with an attentive mother, he would probably not survive. The decision to patch him up as best as possible and return him to the wild was made, and two hours later I accompanied the vet when we reunited the calf with his mother. I wanted to see whether this young cow would again reject her newborn.

  From the safety of our vehicle, we watched the cow approach. Instead of reaching out to touch him the way a mother in the wild would—checking her calf from tip to toe to make sure he was all right—the elephant charged. Immediately I revved up the engine and lurched forward, driving her away from the frightened calf.