Nonfiction

SMELLS LIKE MOSS MAN

by Christine M. Lasek

Like the green slime rimming the crick behind the house where your best friend grew up.

Like the brown and decay of November leaves choking sewer grates.

Like the mosquito-thick drainage ditch in your parents’ subdivision in the dead of summer.

*

In 2005, it seemed like everyone on the University of Michigan’s campus carried around Nalgene water bottles. This was before polycarbonate plastics were thought to leach endocrine disruptors, before fixatives were known to cause chromosomal errors in cell division, before BPAs were a household name. Everyone had the same 32-ounce, wide-mouth bottle made of grayed-out plastic, with liberally scarred screw-top lids in blue or orange or white. My coworker Trace’s bottle had telltale signs of use—dings in the plastic, a section of the bottom scraped and flattened from when he dropped it on the cement.

Trace would fill his bottle from the office faucet, sometimes three times a day. He said this was a habit left over from when he attended Arizona State, where the heat was dry and sucked moisture out of your body, and you would pass out from heat stroke before you even realized you were thirsty and had been sweating all day.

I suspected the water guzzling was to ensure several trips to the bathroom, to break up the monotony of being a content pusher for the online arm of eight Michigan newspapers.

These refillings had a pattern. Trace would sigh. Stretch. Grab his bottle. Lumber to the kitchen. At 6’3”, he was a particularly good lumberer—stooped shoulders, the slow walk of someone who could always rely on his own stride length to keep up with everyone else’s short legs. His uniform of khaki cargo shorts and Crocs made him strangely quiet against the phlegmy hum of mildewy air conditioning and Dell-computer keyboard clacking.

As he walked by my desk to the kitchen, he stopped and sniffed the mouth of his bottle. Turning to Steve, our boss, he said, “Smells like Moss Man.”

I looked at Steve, two years younger than me and with a mop of blond hair that hadn’t seen a comb in days, for some clue as to what Trace meant. What was Moss Man?

Steve gave a knowing smile. He picked up his own Nalgene bottle and sniffed its contents. “I think you should use some soap on that thing, man,” was all he said before returning to his web surfing.

I didn’t have a Nalgene bottle to sniff for reference. My sixteen-ounce disposable bottle of Dasani water was one of the many things that separated the woman from the boys in my office. Others included my business casual attire, my boredom for our work, and my vagina. I would learn during my two years working with Steve and Trace that the glass ceiling was alive and well—my unwillingness (at twenty-five) to attend parties where the primary form of entertainment was a beer pong tourney, my lack of a Nintendo Wii, my indifference to all Michigan State University sports, would manifest into being passed over for raises and promotions. The powers-that-be wanted a “bro.”

I wasn’t going to ask Trace if I could smell his bottle, and after a year and a half of being one of the only women in an office full of twenty-something-year-old boys with journalism degrees, I knew better than to ask him or Steve to explain.

So I did what any good web journalist would do in my situation—I Googled Moss Man.

*

Moss Man is a fictional character from the popular Masters of the Universe franchise.[1] [He] is a plant-based hero who can manipulate plant matter, causing flowers to grow but also causing tidal waves of moss and vegetation.

The Moss Man figure came with a pine-like scent, textured fur-like moss, and was formed from the same mold as Beast Man. [2]

Moss Man was originally conceived by Mattel in the 1980s as a heroic foe for Stinkor, both of which had action figures which were scented. But since the latter never appeared in the original series, the two only come face-to-face in the mini-comic “The Stench of Evil!”[3]

*

As the eldest of three girls, my knowledge of boys’ toys was limited. I only knew He-Man because he was She-Ra’s twin brother, separated at birth. She-Ra: Princess of Power was on after school, and like other children of the 1980s, television was my babysitter—I never missed an episode.

And despite the allure of my Peaches ‘n Cream and Sweetheart Barbie dolls, I liked my She-Ra action figures best. I had Frosta and Catra. I was bitterly jealous of the little girl down the street who had the Crystal Castle, complete with magic key and rising-action tower.

But even in 1987, I knew Bow, She-Ra’s love interest and the only male action figure, was lame—lamer than helmet-hair Ken with the permanent boxer shorts. Bow had tight blue plastic pants with a gold-painted breastplate but no shirt. Instead of the rotating hip action that came standard on the other She-Ra action figures, Bow had a heart in the center of his chest that “beat” when you pressed the button on his back.

Eddie Wheeler lived down the street and our mothers were friends, which meant we played together sometimes. He had the Castle Grayskull and an army of He-Man figures. He-Man, with bulging biceps and Conan the Barbarian’s fashion sense. Fisto, a tiny Chuck Norris with an over-sized fist. These ’roided-up behemoths would swoop in to rescue my delicate She-Ra dolls, sometimes beating up Bow just for being such a wuss.

None of Eddie’s toys had been covered in green fur. Even nineteen years later, I think I would remember if one of the He-Men had made my hand smell weird.

*

I find male camaraderie fascinating—it’s not double-edged like its female counterpart. While I know my girlfriends would offer up internal organs if I needed one to survive, I also expect them to reassure me that, “No, those tapered-leg khaki pants without back pockets don’t make your butt look big.” Beth, Laura, and I are most likely still friends because we decided not to live together during our senior year of college.

My fiancé, on the other hand, is still friends with the same six guys he hung around with in high school. At various times over the years, they have lived together, worked together. Girls were mostly transient, until everyone hit their mid-twenties—when rings appeared on girlfriends’ fingers and everyone settled into jobs, houses, and adulthood.

Ryan and I spent many Saturday nights with these guys—at Easy Street, a bar in downtown Toledo, with dark wood furniture, Tiffany-style lamps, and a jukebox in the back. Ryan, Mike, Jason, Andy, Doug, and Dave were slowly drinking their way through Easy Street’s catalog of beers in order to be inducted into the illustrious Hall of Foam—the honors and benefits occurring thereto including a special Hall of Foam mug, a T-shirt, and your name engraved on a plaque.

They decided to drink the beers in alphabetical order, which made the Ms, with the Millers and Michelobs, particularly rough. Maybe it was one of these beers, or one of the strange imports from Belgium or Germany, but when the glass bottle was set in front of Mike, he took one whiff and pushed it away.

“Dude, it stinks,” he said.

I picked the bottle up and smelled—earthy, but with the acrid undertones of a hoppy beer. A sour, multi-layered smell that spoke of fermentation, of mixing hops with barley and malt, of harvesting, of the green hop clusters ripening in the sun, their roots cold in the black earth.

“Smells like Moss Man,” I said, and put it back down.

I had no idea whether or not it really smelled like Moss Man, but that didn’t matter. All of the guys smiled, stopped talking, stopped drinking their beer or eating their nachos, in order to smell Mike’s bottle.

When it got to Jason, he said, “It does smell like Moss Man,” and for one moment, I was one of them—my cranberry juice with Grey Goose Vodka, a desiccated wedge of lime clinging to the lip of the glass, was suddenly a half-finished pint of Guinness with foam crusting up the inside. My black beret became a baseball cap. I sprouted a five o’clock shadow, traded my cardigan for a hoodie and my four years at Troy High School for an education from the all-male St. John’s Jesuit High School and Academy in Toledo.

In that instant, I was a part of the group in a way I would never be again.

*

“So, what does Moss Man smell like?”

Christmas break at my parents’ house. Ryan and I were lying in the dark, in the same bedroom that still housed my Holiday Barbie collection, my Josef Originals birthday figures, my unbroken run of the first twenty Boxcar Children books.

“Like the Earth, I think,” Ryan said, his voice slow and thick with almost-sleep. “He was supposedly made out of moss, and he smelled like that. Like wet dirt and grass.”

Ryan paused for a moment, and I wondered if he had finally drifted off, when he said, “Of course, I could be making it up. He could have smelled like plastic and Chinese paint, and I just wanted him to smell like who he was, so I’m remembering it that way.”

It occurred to me, then, as I listened to the creaky ceiling fan, the muffled drone of my mother’s late-night television seeping through the door, that everything is probably like that. And just as the guys have deemed Moss Man as their olfactory tie to the past, so could I stake a claim.

The ooo–oooh of Malibu Musk.

The stick of my Velcroed Lisa Frank Trapper Keeper.

That first tube of pink, pearlized Wet n Wild lipstick, ninety-nine cents from Perry Drug Store, which tasted like petroleum and something deeper—a quivering excitement, being on the cusp of something huge. The chasm leapt between middle school and high school, not knowing then that once we were grown, we could never go back.

I have yet to test this theory. But one day soon, when my girlfriends and I are sharing a very adult bottle of Pinot Noir, or standing in a Starbucks line, or eating some of the overpriced pastries from Whole Foods, I will turn to them and say, “Tastes like Wet n Wild,” and they’ll know exactly what I mean.

BETWEEN COUNTRIES

by Ira Sukrungruang

In a restaurant in Chiang Mai, the twins urge me to move to Thailand. They are the youngest of my mother’s siblings, fifty-eight, and are identical except for their hairstyles. Often, they bicker and sound like meowing cats. Today, however, they are on the same page.

I sip coffee. It’s the second week of about fifteen visits to Thailand since I was three, the first after my mother moved back permanently. My mother eats shrimp-paste fried rice. She concentrates on each bite, scooping a bit of rice, fried egg, and Thai peppers onto her spoon. She chews with deliberateness; her dentures are loose, so she is trying hard to keep them in her mouth.

“Listen,” one of the twins says in Thai. “We really want you to think about this.”

“We miss you,” says the other twin. “If you were here, all we would have to do is get in a car, but America is too far for us.”

“Plus, your mother is getting old.”

“Seventy-one,” my mother interjects in English. This would usually draw laughter or exasperated looks, my mother always adding one year to her actual age. This time we don’t respond.

“More importantly,” says my aunt, “we don’t want you to be without your family.”

“Have you thought of that?” says the other.

I have. Every day since my mother retired from working as a nurse in Chicago for thirty-six years and returned to the home of her birth. I’ve thought about it while making a living in upstate New York with my Caucasian wife, Katie, who is spending the summer with her sick mother. I’ve thought about it during car rides to my in-laws in the prairie of central Illinois for Christmases, Thanksgivings, weddings. The thought hits me quickly and without warning: my nearest blood relative lives over eight thousand miles away, on an extended peninsula in the Pacific.

The waiter, who has been hovering a foot away through our entire meal, asks if I want another refill. I tell him no thanks and swirl what’s left in my cup.

“We don’t want you to be alone,” one twin says.

“We want you to be with us,” says the other. “We have been thinking about this the entire morning—.”

“The entire year—.”

“Yes, the entire year.”

“We don’t want to lose you,” they say together.

They keep going, completing each other’s sentences without skipping a beat. They tell me of possible job opportunities teaching English. They tell me I can build a dream home in the mountains, in nature, so beautiful I wouldn’t believe it. Life would be easy here, they say. We would all be happy, they say.

I don’t tell them yes, this is a fantastic idea. Or, what you ask is impossible. Or, let me think about this. I can’t gather myself to be witty or silly, something I do with ease, which would make everyone laugh away the seriousness that has thickened the air like the humidity outside. I can’t gather myself to say what has gotten my mind whirling: Who do you think you are losing me to?

My mother remains silent. She focuses on the steady stream of people walking in and out of the restaurant. Her chin rests on her hand. I look for a hint of agreement, a nod of apprehension, a shake of the head, but she gives nothing away, not at the table when the conversation peters out and one of the twins asks for the check, not even much later in the afternoon—the sun scorching—and it is just my mother and me sitting outside in the heat, while two house cats watch carp swim lazily in the garden pond.

*

My friends often ask what Thailand is like. When I was younger, I knew they wanted to hear something exotic and bizarre, something drastically different from our American lives. “In Thailand,” I would say, “monkeys swing from tree to tree snatching hats off heads.” “In Thailand,” I would say, “during detention, you eat cockroaches.” This was usually followed by wondrous and sometimes disgusted faces and drawn-out whoaaaaas. My stories were never questioned because I learned at a young age that the phrase “In Thailand,” was so powerful that it dispelled all doubt.

As I entered my early twenties, I stopped telling my fantastic tales. I stopped telling stories about Thailand altogether. When asked about Thailand, all I could muster was: 1) It’s crazy hot. 2) The food is awesome. 3) It is beautiful.

Crazy. Awesome. Beautiful. All of which are true, but such statements fail to conjure up images, sensations, emotion.

Such statements are simple and can be applied to a number of places. Tucson is crazy hot. The food in Tucson is awesome. Tucson is beautiful. Over the years, my relationship with Thailand has become increasingly complex. It is the country that colors me. It is the country where my family resides. It is the country I forget about. It is the country I do not understand, yet feel its familiarity in my blood. This complexity has made Thailand a secret.

*

My mother’s dream: she would come and work in America, marry a Thai man, have a Thai son, who would then marry a Thai girl. Then the whole Thai lot of us would move back to Thailand, live in houses near each other, and live happily ever after. There was never any doubt about when my mother would return to Thailand, only when. Besides longing for the land she loved, in Thailand, she would live more than comfortably on her pension and social security checks, the dollar going far compared to the baht. Here, she would be solidly in the middle class, but in Thailand, she was well-off.

*

At night, I wake in a rush and forget for a few seconds where I am. I turn and clutch my body pillow, thinking it is Katie, asking her what time it is or whether she has fed the dogs. I don’t know what cues me back—the floor-hard mattress, the steady buzz of the air conditioner, the croaking toads in the pond outside—but when it dawns on me that I am not lying in my soft Sealy bed with my wife and the dogs are not snoring softly on the carpet, I find myself in a lethargic malaise, feeling as if I am adrift in thick, empty air. It’s a sensation that sticks with me for a few days. And on those days, I am locked up somewhere no one can reach. When asked if there is something bothering me, I say, no, nothing. Or I don’t know. Or I simply do not reply.

This doesn’t just occur in Thailand.

It happens in the states, too, but there I shed the blankets off of me and complain in Thai about the heat and mosquitoes. Once I told Katie to close the windows because the geckos would get into the house. “What did you say?” she said, confused that her husband had slipped into a different language. I was half asleep, and part of me was lying in the living room of my mother’s house in Chiang Mai, the walls white and sterile as a hospital, envisioning geckos scurrying across the window screens. At Katie’s voice I startled awake and gone were the geckos. We laughed at my blunder, but I wished I had invited those geckos in. Let them cling to every synapse of my imagination. Let them run rampant across the bridges of my brain.

*

I am sitting in the bathroom of my mother’s house and this is what I notice. In my bedroom, I’ve cranked up the air conditioning so high that when I enter the bathroom, the heat and humidity instantly fogs up my glasses. I can hear the Cartoon Network (my mother installed cable just for my visit) blasting from the TV—Looney Tunes—while downstairs my mother sits on the marble floor flipping through a Thai magazine while listening to a monk’s sermon on an audio cassette, the Mitsubishi fans blowing on her.

The bathroom is limbo, the in-between of two worlds. I have made America in my room. I ask for American bedding, American decorations, American furniture. I’ve asked for so many things that would be easy to find at a Target or Walmart that my mother says, “You have American things in America. Here you have Thai.”

Downstairs is Thailand with its heat and humidity, its stray dogs and cats, its blossoming trees, its manic mosquitoes, its pollution, its shimmering temples, its delectable food, its impoverished, its monks, its fan-tail birds, my family. I spend most of the day there. At night, I always return to my room.

*

In my junior year of high school, I had an English teacher who challenged students with wit, sarcasm, and difficult questions. I don’t remember her name, but I remember reading a lot of slave narratives, novels about Indians, early settlement literature. I also remember the pointed scowl she gave smartass students to shut them up, which usually worked, a miracle considering she taught a bunch of insubordinate Southside kids who would rather be anywhere else in the world but in an Early American literature class.

I sat with a group of guys on the tennis team, who sat next to the cutest girls in the class, and I watched my friends pass notes back and forth, the girls giggling each time they read what the guys wrote.

Once this teacher—I think her last name began with a B—snatched one of the notes in transit and read it aloud.
“You’re telling me this is more important than A Light in August?” Ms. B said. She carefully unraveled the note, her pinkies pointing up. Her glasses dangled around her neck, but she never put them on. She lifted them up and squinted, peering through them like a magnifying glass.

“How did you get out of the third grade, Mr. Wolfe, with handwriting like yours?”

Brian Wolfe—B-Bear, as we called him on the tennis team—wasn’t fazed. He was cocky and liked the attention. Smiling, he said, “My mom says the same thing.”

Ms. B ambled to the front of the room. She always carried the demeanor of a woman not from this time period, but one who strolled along the Seine in Paris with a parasol. “Well, isn’t this the question of the class. I had hoped we could discuss this today in light of all our readings. What Mr. Wolfe has written so sloppily to Ms. Styx is: I would like to know you better.”

The class laughed. B-Bear mouthed I do at Gina Styx, who was so red she hid her face in her arms.

“Hasn’t it been the case this quarter,” Ms. B said, “that all the texts we have read come back to the question of identity? Who are we? Where do we come from? To whom do we owe our roots? America, from the start, is a country of diversity. It is a melting pot. Its literature is a melting pot. This classroom is a melting pot. So, I, too, as Mr. Wolfe has written to Ms. Styx, would like to know all of you better.” Ms. B pointed at B-Bear. “Let’s start with you, Mr. Wolfe. Please inform the class where your family originated.”

“I’m all Irish, baby.” Many in the class hooted.

“Ellis Island, perhaps,” says Ms. B.

B-Bear nodded.

“How about you, Ms. Styx?” Ms. B said.

Gina barely raised her head out of her arms and whispered, “A lot of stuff.”

“Clarify, please,” Ms. B said.

“Dutch, Scotch, Irish.”

“Very well,” said Ms. B.

Ms. B went around the room, asking each student where they came from, and to be precise. Most of the class said they were Italian, Polish, or Irish. There was a student whose parents were from Pakistan and grandparents were from India. An exchange student from Denmark said he wasn’t Danish at all, but Swedish and German. A girl in the class said she had Indian blood, Cherokee, she thought, but she was mostly Mexican. Another said, “I’m everything that makes white, which is too much to list.”

I dreaded the question. I was sixteen, and all I wanted to do was blend. I had stopped attending temple, stopped praying to Buddha at night, and stopped speaking Thai at home. I thought the Thai in me was “weird,” was the part that got me into trouble while growing up, the part that made my friends mock my mother’s accent when she spoke English, the part that America didn’t seem to care for. Once at an illegal bonfire party in the Forest Preserves off of 95th Street, a drunken acquaintance said, “I’m sick of all these immigrants who don’t speak the language, who go around thinking they are still in their country. You’re in America, be an American.” This guy was an asshole. I hated him, but didn’t have the courage to ask, “Dude, what does that mean?”

So when it was my turn to speak, I gave a smartass answer. “I’m a Chicagoan.”

B-Bear patted my back and said, “Damn straight.”

“Ira,” Ms. B said. I was the only student she did not address with a formal title. “Be serious.”

“I am, Ms. B. I was born in Northwestern University Prentice Hospital. I can give my mom a call and she can bring my birth certificate.”

“Ira,” Ms. B said.

“It really wouldn’t be any trouble. I live right over there.” I pointed out the classroom window, across the green of football field and out of school property at the barely visible black roof of my house. “My mom likes to walk.”

“I am laughing on the inside,” Ms. B said, her face without affect. “And perhaps she can tell me where you originated.”

“She would tell you I came from her womb,” I said. “Most likely, though, she wouldn’t say anything. You see, she doesn’t like white people.”

“That’s enough, Ira.” Ms. B scowled, and I knew I went too far.

Five years later, I visited my high school to interview my former teachers for an education course I was enrolled in at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. I was studying to become one and wanted to know how teachers handled diversity in the classroom. In the hallways, I bumped into Ms. B. Nothing had changed about her. She still walked with the ease of a socialite. Before I could say hi, she said, “Where does your family come from, Ira?”

“Thailand,” I said quickly, forgetting about the classroom incident years ago.

“Ah,” Ms. B said, “I see time has smartened you up.”

*

On my fifth week, I don’t want any more rice or noodles or curries or wontons or any of the foods I had been dreaming of in New York months before my arrival. Nothing seems to satisfy my hunger. I leave plates of food half eaten. The twins ask if the food is OK and I tell them, yes, I’m just not hungry, but the truth is I’m not hungry for Thai food. What my stomach yearns for is a hamburger, French fries, and a vanilla shake. It wants McDonalds, Burger King, White Castles, Wendy’s.

I tell one of my aunts this and suddenly she tells her twin sister and there are a lot of Oh my Gods in excited English.

“Mike’s Burgers,” one twin says.

“Delicious,” says the other.

“Across from the Amari Rincome Hotel,” says the other.

“Where you and Katie got married.”

“Remember?”

I nod.

“The owner is an American.”

“I bet his name is Mike,” I say.

“How did you know?” the twins say together and laugh.

My mother shakes her head and whispers, “It’s just OK. Don’t get your hopes up.”

We pile into a minivan—my mother, the twins, an uncle, and two young cousins. Suddenly getting a burger has become serious business, has become a family outing. I tell them in America I eat a burger at least twice a week, if not more; it’s easy. They say they eat burgers once every six months. They speak of the burgers like French foie gras or expensive caviar. They speak of burgers like how I speak of real Thai food in the States, with fervent longing, with dreamy appreciation.

When we get to Mike’s we find seats along bar. The place has the feel of a 50s diner, with 50s slogans plastered on the wall. I order a cheeseburger and fries with a side of onion rings. The others opt for pork burgers and I tell them, there is no such thing in America.

“Really?” my aunt says.

“Really.”

“But it’s the best here.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

When the food arrives, I notice all eyes on me. What, they wonder, will the American think of Thailand’s version of the burger?

I eat. And it’s a burger. Better than most, but still a burger.

*

Every time I step off the plane, I feel like I’ve arrived home, only it’s a home I’m not familiar with. It is as if I am in a house I know well, but someone has moved all the light switches.

*

In America, I am Ira, a name my mother said she found in a book. She tells me that she and my father waited till the last moment to give me a name. They did not plan beforehand, did not think what the sex of the baby might be. They had skipped ahead in time, worrying about how to afford a future home and move out of their small apartment in the south side of Chicago, how to pay for the baby’s college tuition, how to prevent America from stealing him straight from the crib. Thinking of a name was not on their list of priorities.

“We liked what it meant,” my mother says. She is sewing pajamas from the fabric she bought earlier in the day at a hill tribe village. Her glasses are perched on the edge of her nose. My aunt, mother, and I are hiding from the Chiang Mai heat, drawing the shades over the windows, turning the a/c on high. On days like this, all you want to do is seek shelter and move as little as possible, like the dogs outside sleeping under parked cars.

This is a conversation we often have—the origin of Ira—but each time I ask, I expect to hear a different story, one with more mystery and excitement. For example: my mother had an illicit affair with a rich Jewish doctor and I am their offspring.

“What does Ira mean?” asks my aunt. Her twin is off feeding her cats.

“Successful,” says my mother.

“You do realize it’s a Hebrew name,” I say.

“Is it?” my mother says.

My aunt laughs. “You gave your son a name and you don’t even know where it comes from?”

“A book,” my mother says. “I already said that.”

“Why not a Thai name?” my aunt says. “There are perfectly good ones.”

“Too long,” says my mother.

“People usually assume I’m a Jewish lawyer,” I say.

“Lawyers make good money,” my mother says.

“I’m not a lawyer.”

“Too bad.”

“You can’t even pronounce the name correctly,” I say. “Ira not Ila.”

“No matter,” says my aunt, shaking her head and waving her hand. “Here, you are Tong.”

She’s right. In Thailand, my family addresses me by my Thai nickname. When I hear the name Ira, it sounds like a dream I can’t remember, a thought at the edge of the mind. It is of a man far from where I am, shoveling snow in upstate New York, bundled in a coat that makes him look twice his size. And when the spring comes, he curses the rabbits under his breath for nibbling the top of his tulips.
*
“Let’s get away. Let’s go to a deserted island where no one can find us. Just me and you and the dogs.”

Katie’s family often drives her nuts. It’s the unfortunate setback of being the glue that holds everything together. She is the most rational, most dependable, most accommodating, and because of these attributes, there are sacrifices she makes in her life for the sake of family stability. When crisis strikes—once a month—the phone rings and rings and rings, and soon, my patient wife is on the edge of a breakdown.

“OK,” I say. “Anywhere you want. It doesn’t have to be an island.”

“Somewhere in the Rockies, then.”

“Awesome.”

“The green of Scotland.”

“Fantastic. Keep going.”

“A planet of spaniels and chocolate.”

“I’m with you.”

Truth is: she can’t stray too far because she needs her family as much as they need her. This need is what I envy, even though I often joke: This is why my family is far, far away. I never have to deal with this shit. But I want to deal with it. I want to figure out why one of the twins frowns so much when she thinks no one is watching, or when my young cousin will decide to come out of the closet, or whether my uncle will admit he is having an affair. When my mother calls, I sometimes ask how the family is doing. I ask for gossip. She laughs and says we will have a lot to talk about when I get there. When I get there could be a year or more.

I am trying to understand need and want. For as long as I can remember, I only wanted things I knew I could have—toys, clothes, material possessions. These were easy. I was taught at the Thai Buddhist Temple of Chicago, during those long hours in Sunday school that need was a luxury, and anything that is a luxury leads to excess, which leads to vanity, which ultimately leads to gum, sin. America, however, is a country of needs and wants, and no matter how much I’ve tried to deny them—though many times I have not tried that hard—I’ve been asking myself, What is it I need? What is it I want? The answer is often: I don’t know.

“Let’s go somewhere,” I tell Katie after stressful days. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know.”

*

Katie and I are out with a friend at a Thai restaurant in Oswego, New York, our hometown. We have just arrived back from Thailand. I stayed with my family for six weeks before Katie came to join me for another three. While we were away, a Thai restaurant magically opened in this tiny snow-weathered town known for their bad Italian food and abundance of bars. We sit with our friend describing how American the food is like overeducated snobs, how the noodles are too thin and overcooked, the curry watered down, the spices lacking the essential kick. But the truth: it’s not a bad restaurant. In fact, in the months to come, we will frequent the restaurant so often the Thai workers exclaim, Ajahn! Ajahn!, when I come in. Professor, professor!

Still, this restaurant isn’t Thailand, and our tongues have yet to adjust.

Katie describes our latest vacation. That’s what she calls our trips, vacations. Nothing permanent. A brief three-weeks before we return to the states, back to our dogs panting at home, back to our lives. Most of the dinner, I sit and nod and add a detail or two. Katie mentions the food, “so cheap”; she mentions the beaches in the south, “so beautiful”; she mentions the kindness of the Thai people, “so nice.”

Our friend asks: “Have you guys considered moving to Thailand?”

Two years ago, Katie asked out of the blue, if she weren’t in the picture would I move back to Thailand. Without hesitation, I told her no. But by then, she would never be out of the picture.

I laugh. “My aunts were trying to convince me to.”

“They always do,” Katie says.

“And?” our friend asks.

“My mother would love it,” I say. I twirl stir-fried noodles around in my dish.

“She totally would.” Katie sips Thai iced tea. “But our lives are here.”

I nod.

“Plus, my family would flip.”

They would, and eventually, Katie would also.

But I can’t help imagining a life there. A teak home under the northern mountains, our dogs chasing the geckos on the property, our trees dropping the sweetest fruit. Katie and I would teach somewhere in the city, at American university. We would take the congested bus to work, and come home to watch the evening update about the royal family. And my mother would be there, and she would happy.

This image, however, can only go so far. This Thai life is not a husband and wife life. A husband and wife life resides in America with its four seasons and cornucopia of freedoms. This Thai life is a son’s life. It is a mother’s dream.

And because of this, this life is like the Thai food in this upstate New York town. Satisfying, but not quite right.

*

When did my mother lose hope? When I said my first English word, “more”? When I wanted a Big Mac for dinner instead of jasmine rice and fish sauce? When Luke Skywalker became my role model instead of the King of Thailand? Or was it later, when I was teenager, and I fought with her constantly about the weird things she did, like using mothballs as air freshener? Or was it when I started preferring the company of women whose skin were pale and freckled to the Thai ones she often tried to set me up with? Or was it when I graduated with honors with a Bachelors Degree in English? When I could recite poems by Wordsworth, but could not remember the Thai National Anthem? When I moved farther and farther away, calling her less and less, starting a new life? Was it when I met and married a white woman?

*

I don’t hear anything but the fall. Her hands smack the hood of two cars. The sound echoes in the dark parking garage of a Chiang Mai mall. When I look behind me, my mother is on all fours. She is breathing deeply, sucking in her breath from the pain. I am slow to react. My uncle dashes to her side and a stranger walking behind my mother is on the other.

“Are you OK?” my uncle says, his voice full of worry.

“Oh my god,” says the stranger, a woman in her forties, high heels and hair long and flowing. She looks like what my mother would have thirty years ago, young and attentive and strong. “That was a hard fall. And you’re old, too.”

My mother gets on her knees, but when she tries to plant her left foot and rise, she gasps in pain.

“We might have to call an ambulance,” says the stranger.

“Give me a second,” my mother says. “I need time to gather myself.”

She breathes through her teeth. Her hands tremble.

Throughout my life, I’ve never seen my mother fall. I’ve never seen her in any pain, except for once when I accidentally shut the door on her hand. Even then I don’t remember my mother screaming or grimacing, just her palm swiping the top of my head and her stern reprimand not to be so careless. But here is my mother teetering to get up, face red and sweating, mouth twisted. She sucks in air, sharp like a snake, blows it out in a quiet puff. Over and over. I watch. Frozen. I don’t know what to do or say until my mother is standing, telling the woman she is ok and thank you, until she takes her first wobbly step, clutching onto my uncle and parked cars.

“What the hell, Mom?” I say.

She laughs. “Where were you?” she says jokingly. She means nothing by it, a slight tease, but I wonder the same thing. I wonder in the years to come, how many more times will she fall and will I fail to be there for her, the woman who has been witness to all my injuries.

I don’t answer her. I hold her hand and give it a soft squeeze. I say: “That woman said you were old.”

*

When I return to the States, I know I will forget one detail at a time: the neighborhood mutts howling at night, lotuses that bloom like fireworks, spiky fruit that raises the blood sugar, delicate chiming of temple bells, the gentle flutter of butterflies, the rusted rumble of a noodle cart, vendors and customers haggling at the outdoor market, the sweet scent from the champi tree, elaborate spirit houses dotting neighborhoods, name of relatives, language, evening news updates of the royal family, prayers, monks, and motorcycles.

The only reminder of Thailand is my mother’s weekly phone calls, asking me when I will return and how long I can stay this time.

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Ira Sukrungruang is a Chicago born Thai-American. He is the co-editor of What Are You Looking At: The First Fat Fiction Anthology and Scoot Over, Skinny: The Fat Nonfiction Anthology, both published by Harcourt Brace. Ira has published his essays, poems, and short stories in many literary journals and anthologies, including Creative Nonfiction, the Bellingham Review, North American Review, Isotope, Crab Orchard Review, Post Road, and Tilting the Continent: Southeast Asian American Writing. He has received the New York Foundation for the Arts Nonfiction Fellowship, The Just Desserts Fiction Prize, and an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award, and received support from the Blue Mountain Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Writers Colony at Dairy Hollow. His previous publications include Talk Thai: The Adventures of Buddhist Boy, a collection of poetry entitled In Thailand It Is Night, and a forthcoming book of essays, Southside Buddhist. Ira can be found at www.buddhistboy.com

SHARK WEEK

by Elisabeth Lanser-Rose

Jude gave me a hug and ran his eyes up and down my body, the primordial scan. “Lisa, your photos don’t do you justice.”

“I only put up the bad ones.”

“Smart!” He whisked imaginary sweat off his brow and then opened the hatch of his Land Rover. “You wouldn’t believe how many women post photos from ten years ago. Or thirty pounds ago.”

Men were shallow, but that no longer made me angry. I watched him rifle through roller blades, bug repellant, and a rattling stack of vertical blinds and brackets, all of it tangled with mesh grocery bags—he was active and prepared, he did home improvement projects, he didn’t fuss over tidiness, and at the grocery, he didn’t choose plastic. His hiking clothes had seen a few tumbles in the woods and wash, so he wasn’t just posing as an outdoorsman. He was trim and wiry, shorter than I’d expected, his curly black hair longer, his chin weaker.

“Let’s take the north trail,” he said. “Then we can hike around the west side of the pond.”

I knew better than to go into the woods with a strange man. My only protection was my border collie, Casey, all forty fighting pounds of her. She could bark and raise an alarm, but if a dog barks in the Hillsborough Wilderness Preserve and no one is around to hear her, what good is she?

He shouldered a sleek backpack zigzagged with bungee cords. “I know a spot where we can spread out our blanket.”

I let the word “blanket” hang in the air. We blinked at each other.

He had a cramped smile that didn’t crinkle his eyes. It made him look sad. “It’s a picnic blanket,” he said. “No funny stuff. I promise.”

“Okay.” I bounced on the toes of my old Timberlands that were a size too big. I might have been clumsy galumphing in those boots, but I loved that I was outside at seven o’clock in the morning about to explore the Florida forest with a professional wilderness guide. As long as he wasn’t a serial killer, I might have a nice time. I might even walk out of the woods with my true love. “Can I carry something?”

“Just bring your dog,” he said.

“She’ll bring herself.” I leaned into the backseat of my Mazda, freed my border collie from her seatbelt, unclipped her leash and wondered what self-destructive curiosity compelled me to date. At best, it amused my mind and boosted my ego. At worst, it risked my life. But anything more substantial, like test-driving a mate for two or ten years, just wasted time, and I was running out of that. A widow friend of mine had been married for over fifty years. “I miss my husband every day,” she said. “But if I had to do it over again, I’d just have lovers.” That sounded good, but I’d taken time off from American mating games to study them from a distance. As far as I could tell, nothing worked. No one was safe.

I stepped away from the car to show that my dog was well trained. Casey had the wide world at her nose, but she sat with her forelegs stiff, her eyes fixed on my face. I said, “At ease.” She shot out of the car and ricocheted around the lawn, searching for a stick.

The three of us headed into the woods. The sun rose in a white sky. The mockingbirds had ended their twilight arias. Ground doves materialized on the path just in time to escape Casey by bursting into the air. Catbirds, chipping sparrows, and pileated woodpeckers busied our ears. Three buzzards and a wood stork sailed overhead, silent, soaring, and gorgeous. I had the giddy thought—give me the outdoors, and I’ll give you my heart.

“You sure love birds,” Jude said.

“No, I don’t.” I tossed Casey’s stick ahead of us on the path. Was there no chemistry with this man? Was he unattractive? Or had extended celibacy dried me up?

“We’ve been walking for two minutes, and you’ve identified seven.”

“I have a kind of Tourette’s. I see a bird, I say its name.”

He laughed and regarded me sidelong. “I have the same problem with plants.” He identified a tar flower.

I smiled. I had a thing for botanists.

He had told me on the phone that he worked on contract for the Environmental Protection Agency and as a guide for rich folks seeking wilderness adventure; I did want an active, outdoorsy, accomplished man. Maybe physical attraction would grow. Maybe it didn’t matter. It shouldn’t matter—we weren’t animals.

I turned on my flirtation engines—curls bounced, smiles flashed, voice played con brio, hands danced in the air. “Why does everybody assume I’m a bird-lover? I love all animals. Birds just get themselves seen more often. You watch—if we happen upon a Gila monster or a hammerhead bat, I’ll say their names too.”

“Fair enough.”

I felt witty and pretty and fun. “Female boat-tailed grackle! I love those! More handsome than the males.” I bounced on my toes and threw Casey’s stick. If I charmed him, maybe I’d be charmed. “Bug!”

“Bug?” His eyes twinkled.

“Okay. I don’t love all animals enough to learn their names.” I was absolutely fetching.

The misnamed Hillsborough Wilderness Preserve provided footpaths and lavish picnic pavilions. Where was the wilderness? I hadn’t so much gone into the woods with a stranger as into a kind of arboreal mall. A fat man hauled a red cooler and trailed a squeaky cloud of pink birthday balloons. Men fired up grills, and women marched their children to and from bathrooms designed to spare all future generations of nature lovers from having to straddle a long drop.

“Don’t you worry about our future when there are airport-style bathrooms in the middle of the woods?” I said. “Digging a cat-hole is an important life skill. Maybe there’s an app for that?”

“This isn’t the middle of the woods, believe me.” He took a few silent strides. “I’ll take you there.”

Every few dozen yards stood a sign of treated plywood and glass, a display case that protected from the elements posters on commonplace native plants and animals: palmetto, armadillo, gopher tortoise. It made the wilderness preserve feel preserved, pickled and bottled in formaldehyde. We read posters about alien species: kudzu, cane toad, air potato. People “adopted” tracts of land and pulled invasive plants by hand to protect the native species.

Maybe Jude and I could connect intellectually. “These posters make me feel guilty. Shouldn’t we be pulling kudzu?”

“We should.”

“But isn’t the wilderness the original free market? Doesn’t that make kudzu the big winner?”

“Who’s going to weed out the humans?”

“Exactly! Aren’t we western Europeans ourselves just a wee bit invasive? Look at our footpaths, our bathrooms, look at our acres of asphalt! Kudzu’s got nothing on us.”

He said, “My grandparents were Ukrainian.”

The art of dating is the search for the one native prince in a nation of cane toads. I said, “My mother told a census-taker we’re Sasquatch. He thought that was so interesting. He’d never heard of that tribe.”

The paths were wide enough for us to walk abreast, but I kept falling behind because I played with my western European dog. Border collies come from Scotland. On hikes Casey yo-yoed out front, chasing and retrieving a stick. She’d place it on the path a few yards in front of me, back up a pace and then crouch, holding her breath and watching my feet, my face, and my hands as I approached the stick. I’d bend, sometimes with exaggerated slowness to ramp up the suspense. We’d lock eyes. I’d pick up the stick and toss it ahead.

Once, Jude bent down, picked up the stick, and tossed it behind. That’s what men always did. That and the fake throw. Casey never fell for either trick. She lifted her face and studied him, disgusted, incredulous.

He laughed. “I’m not playing right, am I?”

She blasted past with a grunt, annoyed. He was too stupid to fix his mistake.

“Okay, okay, Casey, I’m catching on.” He liked me, and he liked my dog.

I tried envisioning our future. I’d become a private wilderness guide, like him. He and I would get hired to show people Wild Florida. We’d end up with our own series on Animal Planet, and Casey would be the mascot. She set the stick on Jude’s side of the path and looked him in the eye.

Already he was picking up my mannerisms. He jumped in delight, the way I do. “It’s as if she understood me!”

“It’s as if she’s training you.” Maybe it was better that there be no chemistry between us. Chemistry would just intoxicate and confuse. Instead, we’d bond over nature, and the passion would follow. We weren’t shallow people. I had enough substance of character to like this man as much as he seemed to like me. We marched deeper into the preserve and passed fewer pavilions. The path narrowed, the vegetation thickened, and the museum signs grew portentous: Beware of alligators. Beware of poison sumac.

I decided to take a risk. “We should have our own wilderness show on Animal Planet. Each episode’ll culminate in one unexpectedly dangerous moment. Picture this: My trusting nature and infectious enthusiasm for wildlife get me too close to a deadly needle-shooting cactus or a rabid manatee. Then you save me.”

“I can handle that.” He puffed his chest, walked a few manly strides, and added, “Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For painting that incredibly sexist scenario. It’s hard to tell how you’re doing on a first date. Women call the shots.”

“If women have all the power, why do they need mace?”

“Men have to pretend it doesn’t matter which way it’s going to go, but sometimes it really matters.”

“Like today?” I’d overdone it. I dialed down my flirtation to “idle.”

“Today matters. Yes. And we men have to pretend we don’t want to be cast in chauvinist roles like the one you just described, but the truth is we do. Anyway, I like it.”

We passed a sign: Rattlesnakes are common in the Hillsborough Wilderness Preserve. Do not molest.

“I told you I was married once.” Jude explained that he’d graduated from MIT at age nineteen and turned down an offer from NASA. Instead, he eloped with his sweetheart, Iris. She had contracted a mysterious, fatal illness, so they had no time to waste. Iris died within the year. After her funeral, he hiked alone into the Appalachian Mountains. “I was a widower at twenty. And I was done with life.”

He turned off the main path, leading us away from the shouts of children. Casey had blown ahead and missed the turn. She grabbed her stick and caught up, clipping Jude on the side of his leg as she passed, almost toppling him.

“Sorry,” I said. “You learn to walk cautiously around border collies. Especially on stairs.”

He recovered his balance. “It was late spring,” he said. He slowed to walk beside me, stopping whenever I stopped for Casey’s stick, but he spoke as if to someone floating backwards on the path ahead of us.

In the branches overhead, woodpeckers chattered like something Jurassic. A flight of ibises flashed white above the canopy, but I could see the Appalachian Mountains he described. I’d lived in Pennsylvania for twenty-one years and spent hours in those forests on foot, horseback, and mountain bike. I didn’t see palm fronds, Spanish moss, bromeliads, and mistletoe, but hemlocks, cool shadows, stony paths, and wet tree trunks fallen across brooks.

“At the top of a rise, the path opened on a field of grass as high as my hips,” he said. “It was so . . . bright. I could see forever. With Iris gone, I just didn’t want to live anymore. I waded into the middle of the field, took off my pack, and lay down, knowing I could die there if I wanted to, and no one would find me. Not for a long while.”

We walked without speaking. He’s telling me he’s sensitive and romantic. He’s telling me he knows grief, as if that proved he would never cause me grief. Our boots chuffed and thumped, red-winged blackbirds chirred,and Casey’s paws scuffled. A nine-banded armadillo smashed out of the underbrush and marched its scaly self across our path, looking for all the world like something not of it, something that had scrabbled out of a meteorite. Casey sized it up and dismissed it, not because she had daily armadillo doings, but because she instantly understood that this animal was of no use to her.

As we broached the open expanse of the pond, I thought I ought to reel Casey in. Alligators sometimes kill dogs. I pulled the leash from my belt loop and put my thumb on the clasp, but I didn’t call her. I didn’t want to interrupt Jude.

“My whole life, all that hurry to make it through school faster than anybody else, to be smarter, to be more driven,” he said. “I thought it was all meaningless if someone like Iris could die.” He scooped up Casey’s stick and threw it. “I just lay there, watching the tips of the grass toss back and forth against the blue sky. The grasshoppers were buzzing. I fell asleep.”

We reached the pond, Jude walked along the bank, and I followed. The grass had been mown, and the cattails and reeds had been cleared on one side. I scanned the surface of the pond for gator eyes. Casey dropped the stick in my path. I tossed it.

“When I woke up,” Jude said. “I was surrounded by deer. They were crowded around, all looking down at me.”

I imagined his vantage: blades of grass towering like green skyscrapers around my face and the faces of deer peering down. I could see their tender, whiskered mouths.

“Just like that, I wanted to live.” Jude turned around, gripping the straps of his backpack. He walked bouncing backwards on the path ahead of me. “After they decided I wasn’t a threat, they went on grazing. They stayed with me in that field for—it felt like hours. Ever since then, I’ve been living for moments like that. As many as possible.”

“That is truly charming.” We’d fill our Animal Planet series with charming animal encounters—we’d cure bats of white-nose syndrome and set them free, we’d romp with panther cubs, we’d parasail with pelicans.

He stopped underneath a live oak so massive that its branches had to brace against the ground to steady themselves. One root bent like a giant’s knee, and he stepped onto it and lowered his pack. Standing above me, he turned to survey the site. In one direction, the lawn spread out green; in the other, the wide pond glittered. I wanted to want him. My eyes scanned his long fingers, the cords of muscle in his forearms, the way the placket of buttons on the front of his shirt dropped straight down behind his belt buckle.

He gazed through me. “The whole world seemed to fan out from under my back. I could feel the earth carrying the deer and the mountain as it turned. Have you ever felt that?”

“Sometimes. Lying on the beach beside the Atlantic Ocean. Walking with Casey.” I reminded myself not to let down my guard, so I welcomed Casey when she dropped her stick between us. I checked for other hikers, but we were alone. A woman couldn’t be too cautious; I considered asking to eat at the picnic pavilion. Shoulders lower than rump, one forepaw raised, Casey looked from me to Jude and back, waiting—no, inviting—no, commanding us to toss the stick for her.

He bestowed upon her a paternal smile. I waited for him to say something more, but he just stood there, comfortable in the silence, as if he felt safe having trusted me with his story.

Casey yapped at me to toss the stick, and I did. The moment the stick left my hand, I saw the cottonmouth.

Casey whirled as she always did, and galloped as she always did, looking forward as she ran and glancing backward to track the flight of the stick. My body levitated. The stick hit the ground on the far side of the snake and cartwheeled to a stop. I’m a thirty-minute run from the car. Her four white paws struck the ground, again, and again, each in turn. The rhythm of her stride contained a beat when all four paws were in the air. I’m a forty-five-minute drive from the nearest veterinarian, and I am in my car screaming. In one beat, all paws airborne, Casey sailed over the cottonmouth.

Thicker than my arm, muscular and blunt, the snake lay curled in a loop like an empty speech balloon. Casey skidded to a stop on the stick, clattered with it, picked it up, and found my eyes with her own, as she always did.

I floated, frozen and unbreathing. I have no way to tell you, “Run away, don’t come to me” so you’ll live to come to me.

She paused, puzzled to see me turned into a floating stone. The cottonmouth lay between us and did not move. Casey’s tail swished side-to-side as she picked her way over it and came to me.

I hit the ground, grabbed her collar, and, even though we were a safe distance away, I hauled her another ten feet backwards. Casey wrestled with me, trying to put the stick in my hand. I managed to clip the leash to her collar.

“Something’s wrong with it,” I said. Casey struggled in my arms. I let loose a small sob of relief. “It’s dead.”

“No.” Jude stood upon the root of the old oak and frowned across the garden in the direction of our Biblical enemy. Crouched on the ground with Casey in my arms, I tried to imagine him as my quintessentially capable man, master of all things civilized and wild.

“Are you going to investigate?”

“Heck, no!”

I shortened Casey’s lead and, with herpetological purpose, strode toward the cottonmouth. I stopped well out of reach, but close enough to see the subtle banding in its scales. It didn’t move. I grabbed a pinecone and tossed, ready to leap backward and haul Casey with me. The pinecone bounced off its back.

“Don’t go any closer,” Jude called.

I stepped closer.

The cottonmouth turned its head toward me. Its tongue flickered. Jude called to me again, but I stayed put. I’d birthed a baby girl and coddled her safely through her teens, raised and trained four dogs and a horse, and guided thousands of students through their semesters. I’d traveled in foreign nations alone, hiked mountains and braved the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans and the Red, the Alboran, and the Tyrrhenian Seas. I’d survived four decades without Jude shouting at me from a tree root; I could damn well throw a pinecone at a cottonmouth without getting my dog or myself killed.

“It’s alive,” I reported from the scene. There was a blackened hole in its tail, as if someone had stabbed it with a pencil. “It’s got a bad a puncture wound.”

“Come back. Let’s have our picnic.”

The cottonmouth turned away. Holding Casey close, I took a long, respectful step backward. I watched it drift toward the woods as if pulled on an invisible rope, fat and heavy and coal-black, the grass behind flattened by its heft. Maybe, since the snake was hurt, it had been too afraid to attack Casey. It disappeared in the understory. I walked over to Jude. He had opened his backpack.

“Cottonmouths have a bad rap,” he said, as if I’d been the frightened one. “They don’t want any trouble. We’re okay here.” He put his hand on my shoulder.

I ducked to ruffle Casey’s fur and kiss her nose. I managed to stifle another sob. Somehow, the blanket had appeared on the ground, and I was sitting on it crosslegged, Casey in my lap. My body was knotted up; the whole world was a menace. Under the blank sun, the pond lay still, flat, and dusty with pollen, as if there were no one to take care of it. How long had my daughter, my dog, and I lived with no one to watch over us? At night, by day, at home, in parking lots, on city streets, I kept constant vigilance—are we aware of our surroundings? Are the doors and windows locked? Who would ring the bell at this hour? Is there enough charge on the cell to call 9-1-1? A little blue heron walked the bank, stabbing frogs. A flock of ibises pierced the earth with long, curved bills. I knew that, hidden under the murky water, wide tail, and broad thighs, sunken in the mud on the bottom, front claws and coffin jaws suspended as if in amber, an alligator waited.

All life is a danger to all life. I had a sip of wine; I had Casey safe. The fear that pinched my shoulders loosened, but I wished other hikers would come around. “Weren’t you going to tell me something?”

“Was I? I don’t know.” On his knees like a monk at prayer, Jude presented two small metal bowls and a thermos of onion soup. “Well, here’s something: I was born with two sets of adult teeth.”

“Oh?”

He laid out roasted Portobello mushrooms stuffed with savory mashed potatoes and cheese, fresh crepes with Brie and asparagus tips, and Kalamata olives, grapes, and a baguette. I praised each offering, and Jude was pleased. He lifted a fork to his lips. My gaze followed. The mouth that opened did not contain the customary central incisors, lateral incisors, canines, and so on. It held two rows of uniformly narrow, conical, pointed teeth. Teeth like long, polished pine nuts. Alien teeth.

The mouth swallowed, licked itself clean, and opened wide to display the teeth. The rows of narrow teeth created a mouth within a mouth. “The second set evolved,” the mouth explained, “to replace teeth lost in adulthood.”

“Ah, so we should all have them!” I willed the topic to move on. It would be rude to show any alarm, and I’d hate myself if I let some insignificant genetic aberration invade the landscape of a wholesome relationship. I valued depth of character, none of this superficial business about how many pounds or years or teeth a person had.

Jude thanked me by grinning wide for the first time. “Walking with you and Casey reminds me of the time I went hiking with two politicians and a goat.”

“I remind you of two politicians?”

“No, Casey reminds me of the goat.” He told me how the goat named Melvin stood on his hind legs and offered his hoof for you to shake. “He sure was pretty, black and sleek. When the trail opened up at Gem Lake, he ran ahead and leapt in the air. Happiest sight I ever saw. There was some snow powder on the ground. Remember how when the wind blows the snow, the sunshine makes it sparkle?”

I remembered. That was the life I wanted, hikes in the Rockies with politicians and pretty goats and a grateful man who made it all happen, a man who relished this life as much as I did, the same way I did. Yet all I could think was the last time I saw a mouth like that, Sigourney Weaver shot it with a grappling gun.

Jude produced two ramekins of crème brûlée, a stoppered vial of whiskey, and a lighter. He served dessert aflame. Pleased with his confection, he cracked the caramelized crust in his ramekin and spooned custard into the mouth. Casey dozed beside me, and he scratched her head. He let her lick the ramekins clean. Her tongue and lips, pink and black, slid against her glistening teeth, long and white and stiff as daggers. Earthling teeth. A light wind rippled the surface of the pond. It was one of those opposite days in Florida, the ones that got colder as the sun got higher. I shifted on the blanket, which turned my gaze to the woods where the cottonmouth hid itself, curled around its wound. A shiver blew through me—leftover adrenaline, I told myself, from having seen Casey step over a cottonmouth, the biological equivalent of a live grenade with the pin pulled. I rested my hand on her back. It rode up and down as she panted. Her tongue pulsed obscenely between her ragged teeth.

“We should go to Tampa Theatre,” he said. “There’s a new release Wednesday.”

“Yeah?” I wanted a man who loved Tampa Theatre. I listened while he shared irreproachable things about his work with the EPA, charming things about his wilderness tours, and a bonus detail: He’d made a fortune inventing an inhaler that imparted life-saving cardiac medication directly into the bloodstream through the lungs. I refused to think about teeth. Then, when a fish plunked through the surface of the pond, I sensed the monstrous alligator shadow below. I pointed in the opposite direction. “If we go that way, we can cut back to the car without walking along the pond, right?”

“Sure. We can do that.” He was disappointed that I’d thought about leaving. Plus, I’d suggested a much shorter route.

“Not right now,” I added. “I mean, when we leave.” But it was done. I’d heralded the end of our first date.

He returned his picnic gear to his fancy backpack. As we walked toward the parking lot, he said, “In a few weeks I’m going to the Rockies with Stuart from MIT, his wife, and his brother Greg and his family.” He assumed I’d come along. “Hey, maybe we can film an episode for Animal Planet.”

I smiled. We reached our cars.

“Have you ever been to Bern’s Steakhouse?” Jude asked as he tossed his backpack into the Land Rover. He turned, hanging his slight frame on the door with the ease of a man who thinks himself liked by the woman he likes. “Oh, that’s a stupid question to ask a vegetarian.”

“I used to live three blocks away from Bern’s.” I tried to picture sitting at a table with him. He’d have a fork in his hand. He would lift it. “I never ate there, not because I’m a vegetarian, but because it was right there. You know how you take some things for granted?” I felt strangely depressed and angry.

Casey dropped her stick, left it behind, and pointed her nose at the car door. I opened it. “Casey, hop up.” I buckled her into her seatbelt and stroked her glossy little head. Whenever I blinked, there was the snake. “My hero!” I whirled and hugged Jude. “You saved us from the cottonmouth!”

“I did no such thing! You’re the brave one.” He laughed, loud and happy. “But I’ll take it. Your imagination really works for me.”

“Sorry. I don’t feel well—it’s not the meal. That was great,” I stammered. I was injured, punctured, sick. I would drag myself into hiding. I ducked into my car, confused.

“I’ll give you a call. Drive safe.”

“You too.” I waved. He kept waving and watched me drive off, which made me furious. When I turned onto the highway to Tampa and gunned the engine, exhilarated and cruel, I thought, I will never kiss that mouth.

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Elisabeth Lanser-Rose is the author of the memoir For the Love of a Dog (Random House, 2001). Her novel, Body Sharers (Rutgers University Press), was a finalist for the 1993 PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award for Best First Novel, the AWP Intro Award, and The Washington Prize for Fiction. Her work has appeared in Sugar Mule Literary Magazine: Women Writing Nature, Ascent Literary Journal, The North Carolina Literary Review, Art Mag, Kestrel: a Journal of Literature and Art, and Feminist Studies. elisabethlanserrose.com