“I don’t really go to temple.”
“Right, right.” This was something he said a lot, usually when he wanted a conversation to be over, and he used it to mean something like, “Well, we don’t have to worry about such small matters now.” He laid his paddle on the ball, still careful not to look at Janek, and, before he walked out of the room, he shook my hand again. “I will look forward to your invitation, and may I say in departure, ‘Shalom.’”
* * *
I spent my first few weeks at the zoo wondering if I’d been there long enough to quit. I came home each day too tired to practice, daydreaming about skipping work the next morning, hurting in my kneecaps and wrists and the right side of my neck (never the left, for some reason). And each morning, still so tired that I’d feel my mind wobble every time I blinked, I’d stand downstairs in the freezing zoo kitchen and chop yams and zucchini and carrots with a knife that could have chopped off a horse’s leg. Taped all over the room were angry messages from Paul, disguised as jokes: Animals Don’t Have Forks and Knives! Cut Veggies Small! The radio on the shelf could hardly get reception through the floor, so I’d listen to talk radio with gospel and oldies buzzing underneath. No matter how fast I chopped, by the time I was stacking the bowls to bring upstairs, Paul would show up in the doorway. “Hungry animals upstairs,” he’d say, “hungry animals. Let’s go.”
By the ten-thirty break, the idea of still having a full day ahead of me seemed like an emergency, something I couldn’t possibly be expected to bear. Zookeeping wasn’t hard work the way I imagine house building would be, where by the end you’d feel like tearing off your shirt and diving into a lake. It was hard work like making a hole in a concrete wall with your fingernails. Until I’d been there for a week, I had no idea how small the Children’s Zoo was. I’d walk circles and circles past Cow, Sheep, Pig, Goats, Cow, Sheep, Pig, Goats, and the only thing worse than walking those slow circles was when I had to stop and actually do something.
Cleaning Pig was the easiest job, because they lived on a hard floor—I’d shovel up their poop, soft apples that barely smelled, and then hose the whole pen down. The hosing was sometimes even fun, tilting my thumb over the hole, trying to make the water curve in a perfect sheet up over Lily. But when Paul would assign me to do Sheep or Cow, my legs would suddenly feel like they couldn’t hold me up. Such stupid, embarrassing work—raking and scraping and shoveling for animals that only wonder, while you grunt under another load, why you haven’t fed them yet. At first I’d make friendly, tired faces at the families standing looking in, but eventually I realized that they weren’t looking at the keepers any more than they were looking at the water bowls. We were stagehands in a play starring Dudley and Frankie and Kramer.
Cleaning Othello’s pen, even though he had more personality than the sheep, was the worst. He covered his square of dirt with heavy black Frisbees of poop, and the smell—sharp, sour, eggy—made me have to breathe through my mouth. But gnats were everywhere in his pen, and if you held your mouth open for too long one would fly in, tickling your lips or choking you. Every afternoon when Othello’s hay needed changing, we all fought to be the one who could hide out in the bathroom.
Cleaning Goat was almost as bad, at first—raking up all those piles of hair and hay and thousands and thousands of coffee beans of poop—but the Nubian goat, Newman, wouldn’t stand for sulking. While I leaned on my rake, he’d walk up next to me, like a dog, and nudge his head against my arm until I petted him. The rest of the goats made noises when they wanted something—they’d open their mouths, standing perfectly still, and force out a hard, angry myaaaaaaaa. Newman, though, was completely silent. In the afternoons, when I’d be squishing sweat with every step in my boots, I’d sit on the stump and he would try to crawl onto my lap. Fat, clumsy, and with elbows as hard as hooves, he’d stare up at me with his yellow eyes, wondering why he couldn’t fit.
The zoo disappoints most people who come, I think—the rats swimming in the duck ponds, the food machines that give you almost nothing for fifty cents, the animals that are too hot and tired of having their ears pulled to let you pet them—but that first sight of Newman makes almost everyone smile. He stands tall and white with his horse neck way out over the fence, and kids, coming around the corner, let go of their babysitters’ hands and start running.
After dinner once, David asked me if I’d mind taking a walk so he and Lucy could talk. I walked up Fifth to the zoo, not really thinking about it, and the Cuban security guard, Ramon, let me in without any fuss at all. First I walked a slow lap of the whole zoo, feeling gentle toward all these sleeping animals, embarrassed at how much hate I worked up for them during the day. Only the dim orange security lights were on. When I came around to Goat I was surprised—and, I realized, happy—to see Newman standing awake at the fence. His eyes followed me around the pen, and when I got close enough, he nibbled lightly on my sleeve—not to eat, I don’t think, but to check on me, to say hello. I scratched his head and he shut his eyes and pressed against my hand. I rubbed the smooth places where his horns would be, if he had them. You don’t really know how lonely you are, I don’t think, until you get some relief from it. I climbed into the pen, followed Newman back to the corner where he slept, and sat down feeling quietly and perfectly understood. Within a few minutes his huge white side was lifting, falling, lifting, falling. His head was against my leg. The ground in the shed was not quite wet, not quite dry, and almost the same temperature as Newman’s body. I scratched along his spine and talked to him—about living in the apartment, about being surprised to miss home—and whenever I’d stop for a minute, he’d tilt his head up so I could rub behind his ear.
When I was still living at home, I’d watched a show on the Discovery Channel one night about an African tribe called the Masai. I hadn’t even watched all of it, but for some reason now, in the dark, in the shed, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. The idea that right then there were people walking in red robes with herds of animals, under a brighter sun than I would ever see, gave me goose bumps along my arms—it seemed like a challenge to change my life. To love an animal, to walk with a spear and a goat past loping giraffes, to sleep in a hut protected by thorns—sitting there with Newman it all seemed so admirable and, even stranger, possible.
As I was leaving, I said something to Ramon about Newman, how different he sometimes seemed from the rest of the animals, and Ramon said, “These goats, man, they’re like my seven other children. I get in a shitty mood sometimes, working overnight, I just walk over there and check out Newman, check out Suzie—five minutes and I’m good to go for the rest of the day, I mean seriously.”
Ramon worked some day shifts during the summer, too, and from then on he was the person at the zoo I talked to the most. Every day, no matter how hot it was, he wore his blue jacket with his name stitched on the chest. Besides security, he was in charge of rat control, and about this and everything else he talked like tomorrow he was taking a vow of silence.
“All my life I’ve been hating rats. As long as I could remember I been wondering, Whose life would it make even the littlest bit worse if you killed all the rats? People don’t think in those kinds of terms often enough. Whose life would it make worse if you killed all the mosquitoes? I’ll tell you: the birds’. And people don’t have birds, then the rest of the bugs get out of control and you’ll think the times before with the mosquitoes were a picnic. That’s honest thinking. But not with rats. All rats fucking do since Adam and Eve is give people diseases, bite people, scare people, ruin lives that were going along just fine till those sick gray fuckers showed up.”
He’d walk up anytime I didn’t look busy, and once he did I might be stuck for the entire afternoon.
“My father, have I told you about my father’s restaurant? The only good Cuban food you could find in the entire New York area. Seriously, unless you’re in my grandmother’s house, the only place in all of New York where you’re going to find halfway decent vaca frita, or if you want the real sweet maduros, the only place you’re going to find it’s in my dad’s restaurant. Right on the main drag in Washington Heights, one of the most popular