Zoology. Ben Dolnick
trouble—Scooter’s asleep right there with the long beard, and that,” he said, pointing to the tall white one, the only one without horns, “is Newman. He’s a Nubian. Totally different species. He’s a big goof. One of the security guards calls him Jar Jar, because of the ears.” The goats looked smart and scrappy, a gang of cartoon grouches and goofballs. Their pupils went the wrong way, and they all looked up at me expecting something—they were the Bad News Bears and I was their new coach. Newman came right over, nibbled at my collar, then rested his head on my shoulder and took a loud breath. He had big pink nostrils and little square teeth. He smelled like dust and hay. His ears hung below his chin, and he looked—with his barrel of a body on top of those long, skinny legs—like a little kid’s drawing of a horse. The Summer Learners came around the bend with their hands full of food, and Newman scrambled to get in position, his front hooves in the mesh of the fence, his neck leaning way over, and his head bouncing from hand to hand.
“He’s just a big kid, always hungry,” Paul said, and that’s when, with a quick bob, Newman lifted the glasses off my face. Paul jumped the fence and grabbed a handful of Newman’s neck hair, then wiped my glasses on his shorts before he handed them back. “He’s terrible sometimes. I’ll make a note for him not to get Enrichment this afternoon. Usually, something like that happens, you’ve got to fill out a report. Last month he broke some woman’s camera, we had to pay two hundred bucks.”
I still haven’t fixed the scratch on my glasses’ left lens. He snuffled the food from a row of girls’ hands, snuffled them again to make sure he hadn’t missed anything, then lifted his head before bobbing off down the line.
* * *
When Paul called Monday afternoon to offer me the job, I decided to go for a celebration walk, and while I was looking for a place to get an egg-and-cheese sandwich, I realized I was right by David’s hospital on Fifty-first. Long escalators led up to a busy lobby with a gift shop full of flowers and silvery balloons. A week before I would have felt uneasy in a place like that, suspicious that everyone who walked past was wondering why I wasn’t at work. But I felt now like a businessman paying a visit to a friend, full of easy braggy charm.
In the elevator I only noticed that I was humming because of how the nurse was staring at me.
David’s face—like mine but wider and flatter, like a cow’s—can’t hide anything, and he wasn’t glad to see me. For some reason he shook my hand. “Good to see you. Just stopping by? What’s up?”
“I can come back later.”
“No, I’m sorry, it’s just hectic here. I’m an hour behind on my afternoons and I’ve gotta get somebody’s lecture notes for this morning. I’m about to see a nice kid now, though. You wanna come sit in? I’ll tell her you’re a first-year.”
She walked into the office wearing shorts and carrying a folder, and she did seem nice, but to tell the truth I could hardly look at her. There wasn’t a spot on her face that wasn’t covered in acne, a Halloween mask she could never take off. David shook her hand without wincing, and she hopped up on the table, swinging her legs and crinkling the paper.
“Your chin’s looking better,” he said, “and it’s a lot less angry up here around the temples and the hairline. How many milligrams do we have you taking now?”
“A hundred.” It was strange to hear a little girl’s voice come out of that face, like expecting milk and getting orange juice.
“I think we’re going to step it up to one-twenty for the next two weeks. This is Henry; Henry, this is Joan. Henry here’s at NYU, hoping to be a dermatologist himself.” He stuffed his tongue in his top lip to keep from smiling.
“I want to be a doctor,” she said, looking at me now. “Either an open-heart surgeon or the person who helps with babies.”
“She designed the entire Web site for her school. One of the most talented people I’ve seen,” David said. “And within six months we’re going to get her all cleared up and she’s going to be one of the most beautiful people I’ve seen too.”
She smiled and seemed so brave, so patient and gentle about living with her face, that I hated myself for being disgusted by her.
David has never had more than ten pimples in his life, but he’s always been a fanatic about his skin. When we were growing up he was full of weird ideas: olive oil and sugar, Aqua Velva, ice water—his routine before he’d go to bed used to take half an hour, but I don’t think he would have had any pimples if he’d wiped once with a wet rag and eaten nothing but chocolate cake. I wasn’t so lucky. From the time I was in eighth grade until a couple of years ago, I didn’t have a single day where I woke up and my face looked the way I wanted it to. Every night I’d smear on the creams and swallow the pills that Dr. Fordham, nutty in his toupee, would send me home with each month, but I may as well have prayed or done a skin dance. In the morning I’d stand in front of my bathroom mirror and with however many fingers it took I’d cover the biggest pimples of the day and think, Like this you wouldn’t look so bad at all. On the worst days, Dad, who had bad acne when he was in high school and still has scooped-out-looking scars on his chin, would say, glancing over while he drove me to school, “You’re a very handsome kid.”
When the girl left, the office secretary, a fat woman with braces and heavy makeup, said, “Stephen Takas just called and canceled, and Dr. Harrison’s just come back in, so you’ve got about forty minutes if you want to take lunch. Now, is this your brother? Why haven’t I been introduced?”
“Laura Ann, Henry; Henry, Laura Ann. This is the famous secretary who can balance her checkbook and do a month’s schedules and talk to two people on the phone, all at once.”
She blushed and looked down at her lap. Like he was already a big-shot doctor, David rapped his knuckles on her counter and said, “We’re gonna go around the corner. What can I bring you back?”
“Nothing for me, I’m having cottage cheese,” she said. “Here, Mona, come meet Dr. Elinsky’s brother. Henry, this is my niece.”
From a back room full of file cabinets stepped a girl who looked my age. Tan with blond hair pulled into a ponytail and a tight white T-shirt and a big smile. If I could get close enough I was sure she’d smell like warm laundry. “Hi there,” she said.
“Can we bring you anything, Mona?” David said. There was something about the way he didn’t quite look at her when he said it.
“No thanks.” And something about the way she didn’t look at him. “I was just about to leave for the day.”
David took me into a pizza place on Fiftieth. He asked me about the zoo, what I’d be doing, how much I’d be getting paid, but all I could think about was Mona. The idea that girls like her lived in the same world as girls like the one with acne—that girls like her lived in the same world as me—filled me with bright, itchy panic, like there was something crucial I’d missed doing years ago.
A crumpled old man was working behind the counter, opening and closing the ovens. There was something wrong with his hands—arthritis, maybe. He held them and used them almost like they were paddles. “How you doing today, pops?” David said in a voice I’d never heard him use.
“I’m not dead, and if you can say that, how bad a day can it be?”
David laughed hard and patted the old man on the shoulder while he paid.
“This place is great, huh?” he said when we sat down, but my slice wasn’t much better than the pizza I’d been getting at Somerset. “Silvio opened it when he was thirty-two, and he hasn’t been gone for more than two days since. A doctor told me he ratted on his brother in Florence and sent him to jail. I keep meaning to ask him about it when it’s not so crowded.”
I couldn’t figure out how to ask about Mona, but I had to know more about her. So I said, “Mona’s pretty, huh?”
“Mona?” But he flared his nostrils and had to really work not to grin. “She