"Wild Zebras" by Rachel Zarrow
Fig. 1. A periwinkle sky, shared by a sliver of moon and a yolk of sun, glimpsed through a thicket of oaks.
I cannonball into the reservoir, shattering its glassy surface with my feet and ass. When I come up for air, I search the shoreline for your figure, and for one desperate moment, I think you’ve left me. But then I see you sitting on a nearby log, watching me with that expression of amusement and curiosity that you always wear around me, one I interpret as a look of infatuation, of love, even.
Once you’ve made it clear that you’re not joining me—holding up your steaming enamelware mug of coffee as if to say, I’m good but cheers to you, old boy, for getting after it—I float on my back, looking up at a cloudless sky that’s fading fast from night to day. I’m pleased with how the photograph of the sky and oak trees turned out. I can already envision it in the photo album I’m putting together for your birthday, a visual record of the farm you’re building on the land your grandfather left you when he died.
It’s Saturday morning and we have until Sunday night. I know our weekend routine better than my weekday schedule, storing it in the part of my brain reserved for things I actually like. I’ll milk the sheep; you’ll make sheep’s milk lattes. I’ll gather the eggs; you’ll make omelets. On my drive down last night, I envisioned the weekend as an infinite and magical bookshelf, one we’d fill with chores and meals and games, willing our slim paperback moments to compress, to make room for more. Now, as I swim across the icy reservoir, my body numb, I find that time is slipping away.
I reach the reservoir’s side, and as I attempt to emerge, I lose my footing on the steep grade but manage to stay upright, only partially embarrassing myself in front of you. I towel off and pull my sweatpants back on before taking a seat next to you on the log. I turn on my camera, and the image of the reservoir fills my screen. I turn it off, and make eyes at your coffee. You lift the mug to your mouth, staring at me over its rim. You hand it to me, and I find it empty. You rise and stretch your back. It cracks three times.
In the barn a few minutes later, a stream of milk hits the bottom of the mason jar with a satisfying and prolonged plink. I squeeze Gloria’s teat in the wavelike motion you taught me, a gesture that starts with my pinky and moves up my fingers toward my thumb.
You’re pouring feed for your goats and raking up the pebbles of their shit. You hang your rake on its peg, then approach me. Seated on a wooden stool under Gloria, I raise the jar, proud of how fast I’ve managed to collect what we’ll need this morning. You grunt.
“One of these days I’ll teach you how to do this right,” you say, and my heart swells, as it does every time you make an intimation of our future.
Gloria dribbles milk onto my thigh, droplets pocking the light heather of my sweatpants. She agrees; I have much to learn.
In the kitchen, I watch you prepare our breakfast, my favorite form of entertainment. I marvel at how a man so large, with a dog so large, can fit in such a small space. You pour the sheep’s milk’s foam you’ve just whisked over the espresso, and I feel as if I’m under a Big Top, an audience of one at a strongman show, watching you handle all these dainty kitchen implements with your large, calloused fingers as you make our omelet. I wonder if you’ve grown taller in the five years since we graduated. In my memories of you from the all-guys floor of our freshman dorm, you’re taller than me. But here in the kitchen, you’re of a different proportion. If I’m a man, you’re a giant.
I run a hand through my hair, still wet.
“Why didn’t you swim with me?” I ask.
“I didn’t want to,” you say with a yawn.
“Why not?”
“I can swim whenever I want,” you answer, pouring espresso from your silver stovetop maker, first into your mug, then into a second mug for me.
Buttercup sits under the counter and rests her chin on my thigh. She sniffs, smelling Gloria’s milk, and she begins to lick at the spots that have dried. I gently push her face away.
“It’s not like anyone would’ve seen us,” I say. “None of the guys get here till—what—nine thirty on Saturdays?”
I brace myself for your response. We don’t ordinarily discuss “the guys” in any way that acknowledges what their presence means for us, how we shrink away from each other when they’re on the clock.
“They get here at ten,” you say, passing me the plate with the omelet and two smaller plates.
And now we’ve pivoted, talking about the day ahead, which is a workday for you and the farmhands. You cut the omelet in half. Buttercup moves out from under the bar and repositions herself at your feet. Whether she’s after you or your breakfast, I’m not certain, but what I do know is that she’s no longer interested in me.
Fig. 2. The Central Coastline, as seen over the tops of nectarine trees.
It’s the afternoon and we’re picking nectarines. I stand on top of a ladder with my camera dangling on my chest. The speed at which the day is moving feels out of control, and I’m shaking a little. Or maybe I’m just excited to be here. To be with you. To be here with you. To feel the sun on the back of my neck. To feel the breeze against my legs. To admire the spanning views of the Pacific beyond the foreground of treetops and golden hills from my perch on top of the ladder. Or maybe I’m just shaking because I’m scared of heights.
When my feet are back on solid ground, I bite into the best-looking nectarine I’ve picked, perfectly ripe without a single bruise. You catch me in the act and scold me for slacking on the job. But then, after looking over your shoulder, you spank me with your hat and take a bite, driving your teeth into the flesh of the fruit in my hand. I lick the juice off your chin, where it pools in that shiny scar your beard can’t seem to grow over. At least I can grow a beard, you say, whenever I tease you about it. I imagined my own face when I read the words “fuzzless peach,” in an article about nectarine production you showed me a few weeks ago. If you’re a peach, I’m a nectarine.
You give me an almost chaste kiss on the mouth, but you’re holding the back of my head and I want to exist only in the palm of your hand. I live here now, I want to declare. Squatters’ rights.
We walk toward your ATV, each of us carrying a crate of nectarines. I think about what I’ll do with all this fruit. You remind me that this was your lunch break, that the peach and nectarine trees are your side project, not your actual work. You have to get back to the avocado and almonds trees, where the guys are working, and you’ll be with them till five or so tonight. I imagine saying something like this to my coworkers back in our open floor-plan office between meetings about ad copy and email campaigns. The peach and nectarine trees are my side project, not my actual work, Cindy. I laugh a little. My coworkers don’t know anything about you; they hardly know anything about me. The most I’ve ever told them is that I sometimes visit the Central Coast on the weekends. It wasn’t until one of them asked me if I’d seen the wild zebras roaming near Hearst Castle that I understood: you weren’t joking about the zebras. They really exist.
You walk ahead of me, following the path, but I cut through the brush, my arms wobbly under the weight of all this fruit. When I reach your ATV, you take the crate from my hands.
“Well done,” you say. “You just walked through poison oak.”
The crates of fruit rattle as you drive me to your cottage. You tell me where you keep the special soap for removing poison oak oil.
We cruise down the path, flying past the fenced area where the momma goats and kids frolic. I take off the trucker hat I’ve stolen from the shelf in your room. I know it’s not possible that I’m already feeling itchy from the poison oak but I am. The breeze dries my head-sweat, and I scratch my scalp. I don’t understand how you wear a hat every day, but there’s a lot I don’t understand about your life. What I do know is that I never feel as free back home as I do here, and if I had to choose between my salaried job—in my office without windows, its kitchen filled with packaged snacks that taste like nihilism—and a life here with you—a life that includes occasional run-ins with poison oak—it’s not even a choice.
Fig. 3. The Shower Frog.
Buttercup greets me by the screen door to the utility room. She lunges toward me, her tail smacking a pair of your dirty boots. She whines, and in her excitement, pees a little, a behavior I always find endearing, one you always find infuriating. I wipe up the mess with a few paper towels and scratch behind her ear before removing my shorts and throwing them in your washing machine.
I pull back the shower curtain and find Percy the Shower Frog stuck to the wall. I snap a picture of him before turning on the water. I scrub with the earthy smelling bar of brown soap you keep in a cup under the sink, scrubbing and scrubbing, using the bar directly on my skin in a way I wouldn’t ordinarily dare with another person’s, but it’s urgent and necessary.
I watch the rise and fall of Percy’s slimy little body, and I think of the weekend I named him, the weekend your sister drove up from San Luis Obispo and surprised us for the Fourth of July. How I could hear her voice through the screen window; how, when she asked who was in the shower, you responded that it was an old friend from college. All weekend I pretended to be just that, the Old Friend From College. My sister knows all about you. She’s never met you, but she could recite the menu of every meal you’ve cooked for me, the types of kale we planted a few months back, the names of all the kids born in the spring.
When I’ve scrubbed away all the potential poison and changed back into my sweatpants from the morning, I sit on my barstool—or rather the stool that’s become mine every other weekend over the past six months—and turn on your laptop to Google “anaphylaxis” and “poison oak.” Your email is open. I always tease you about not having a password, but you always reply that I’m the only person who’s ever in the same room as your laptop. Before I can open a new tab, I notice a white box with my name in the recipient line, a blank subject, and the beginning of an email. Before I realize what I’ve done, I’ve read it.
Subj:
I’ve been sitting here thinking of the right way to say this since you left earlier tonight. But when it comes to words, you’re better than I am, I’ll give you that. It’s just that
It’s just that…what? The email has been abandoned. I click on Drafts. You last edited it two weeks ago, right after my last visit. But then I remember that snooping through someone’s emails is not something I do. I close the laptop with such force that Buttercup starts, letting out a solitary bark.
I’m sweating and my heart races as I begin to formulate explanations for why I read your email, explanations for why you wrote what you wrote, explanations for what you meant. It was an honest mistake on my part. But your part? I have no idea.
And I still don’t know what to do with the nectarines. I peruse your extensive cookbook collection, the wholesomeness of this task calming my nerves and assuaging my guilt. One of the things I love most about your cottage—it’s not a cabin, no matter what you say; it’s a cottage fit for a woodland nymph—is the bookshelf that lines the den, wrapping around the walls just above the window frame, filled with your cookbooks and agriculture textbooks. If I moved here, we’d build another shelf, one for all the novels and short story collections and angsty memoirs I both love and loathe so much, reminders of what I could be doing with my degree. But I can’t focus on unbuilt bookshelves, so fixated I’ve become on unsent emails.
I wonder if you still plan to send the email or if you’ve changed your mind. If you’d sent the email, would I be here this weekend? And even if you never intend to send it, what does it mean? Is there any chance of realizing my dreams of a future on this land with you, with Buttercup, with Gloria, with Percy? I’m spiraling, and I force myself to focus on fruit instead.
I make Martha Stewart’s nectarine pie. I start on the crust but mess up, cutting the cold butter in strange wedges and triangles rather than cubes. But you’re not here to see it.
I chill the dough in the fridge and mix the filling before settling into your armchair to read the copy of Devotions I left here the first time I visited. I recall that visit with alarming clarity. We’d been messaging on Facebook for a month after I’d impulsively commented on a photo of the farm. It had been years since we’d seen each other, and when you invited me to visit, I knew it wasn’t as an Old Friend From College or a friendly freshman year dorm-mate. There was something suggestive about your messages. It’s the most beautiful place on earth but it gets lonely as hell, especially at night, you wrote after midnight.
The first morning I woke up in your bed, you were gone. I didn’t yet know my way around the property, having arrived after sunset. Everything had been a dark blur under the velvet sky—fireside whiskey, stargazing, your story—which I didn’t believe—about the wild zebras, then stumbling into the cottage, getting tangled up in your bed.
The morning, by contrast, was clear and calm. All alone in your tiny house, I missed you. I already missed you; I’d missed you since freshman year. I knew, even then, that being with you was a victory, was access granted to a place more beautiful than I’d ever thought existed.
I found a cold pot of stovetop espresso, which I reheated. I sat in this very armchair reading these very poems in a meditative state, wondering when you were coming back, the scents of lemon verbena and lavender wafting in through the screen windows, when I heard the gunshot. I’d never heard a gun fire in real life but there are some sounds that sound exactly as you expect them to sound.
I closed the book and sat there, uncertain what I should do, certain that I could no longer concentrate on poetry.
Half an hour later, I heard the screen door open, the faucet in the utility room running for two minutes. You walked into the den smelling of something dirty and sour and slightly metallic.
“I’m glad you found the coffee,” you said, nodding at the mug on the floor next to the armchair. “I had a bit of a rough morning.” And then you went on to tell me how Evelyn, one of the goats, went into labor, and the smallest of the three kids was born with a serious congenital abnormality. She wouldn’t have made it another week.
“It had to be done,” you said.
I close the book again. This time it’s not a gunshot that steals my attention from Mary Oliver’s words; it’s the drafted email. I feel an onslaught of nausea, and suddenly I see your cozy den as a stage set for a scene in my life. I feel the wool of your grandfather’s blanket draped across my lap, and I suspect that this is the last time I’ll be sitting here. I consider sliding this book into my weekend bag, but I think the better of it. You can’t say I’m not an optimist.
Fig. 4. Cartons of Hass avocados picked and sorted by size, waiting to ripen in a dark room.
I open the heavy industrial door to the sorting room. The air is still, and you stand in a corner with three workers hunched over a tablet, likely discussing some detail about Wednesday’s pickup, what time the distributor is arriving. Whenever I see you working—you a white man ten years younger than your employees—I prickle with discomfort and wonder if you have any idea how privileged you are. The sprawling farm your grandfather left you, a place to live rent-free, the privacy of so much land and so few people, the freedom of space to be what you want to be. The privacy of 10,000 acres, and yet you still want us to hide. The one time I brought this up, you simply mumbled, “It’s nobody’s goddamn business.”
The door slams behind me, and all four of you look up. I can’t read the expression on your face, and I’m back to thinking about the email. I try to distract myself by taking pictures of the avocados, focusing on their bumpy skin. They look the way dinosaur eggs must’ve looked.
“What’s up?” you say, walking toward me, leaving Mario, Pepe, and Cal convening in the corner. Your stride is confident and casual.
I don’t ask you about the email. I don’t even know why I’m here.
“I’m making a pie,” I stammer, when I finally remember my purpose.
“Oh yeah?” you say in a low voice, keeping at least three feet between us.
This distance makes me want to grab your hips and pull them against mine, stick my hands in the pockets of your jeans, and claim you as my own. I stick my hands in my own pockets instead.
“Yeah, with all the nectarines. But I can’t find that uh… you know… that tool… that thing that makes the edges wavy,” I say, adopting the same hushed tone you’re using.
“Have you checked the cabinet in the pantry?” you ask.
I have not checked the cabinet in the pantry.
You pick two ripe avocados from the nearest bin and toss them toward me, one at a time. I almost miss the second, but I catch it against my chest.
“These are for dinner,” you say. “Burger night.”
As I head back into your cottage, I wonder if it’s burger night because I love burgers, because you know I love burgers. The pie crimper is in the cabinet in the pantry, like you said it would be. I fill the bottom crust and weave the lattice strips over the shiny filling, pinching the edges before sliding the pie back into the oven. But the more likely reason it’s burger night is because everyone loves burgers.
Fig. 5. A pie made with nectarines from your orchard served with crème fraiche from your goats’ milk.
The pie is perfect. So perfect that I break my own rule, and take a picture of my food. So perfect that I experience an overwhelming pride that maybe you and Martha are used to, but one I’ve never felt in the kitchen. After we devour half the pie, we listen to jazz and wash the dishes.
We smoke a bowl on your grandfather’s blanket under the stars, and you try to show me Orion’s belt but, like always, I can’t see it. You tell me it’s because I’m a city person, but I remind you that Cupertino is hardly a city. And you remind me that it’s even worse: a suburb. My body tingles, and I imagine yours does too. You tell me you want another slice of pie and I tell you the pie was more delicious because I found the crimper. Then we’re laughing the way we laugh when nobody’s around. We laugh and laugh and laugh, the way only we know how to laugh, and I feel a deep reverberation under my head, which is resting on your stomach, a gentle bouncing that assures me there’s a reason you keep me around.
On the walk back to the house, the batteries in your lantern die. In the dark, we reroute to the garage where you keep the spares, as if we need a reason, as if this isn’t inevitable. Other than the first time during my first visit, we’ve always done it in here and only here, going through the charades of stargazing or taking a night walk first. But we always end up in the garage, and so I prepare earlier, knowing how the night is going to progress, yet pretending that this is something spontaneous.
I once tried to initiate sex on the blanket under the stars. You rolled over, pretending to be asleep and only later, after I pried, did you reveal that you hadn’t want to fuck on your grandfather’s blanket because it made you “feel weird.” I realize now that that was the only time you’ve ever told me how something made you feel.
I set the blanket on one of the work benches while you fumble through drawers. I can’t make out shapes but I hear your movements, a click. I hear another sound, one I know, you opening the bottle of lube you keep in the back of the top drawer. Then I see an orb of light. You’re setting the lantern on a workbench and your face is illuminated and hungry. You’re against me, whispering in my ear, telling me you’re glad that I got rid of the poison oak on my legs or else this wouldn’t be happening. You’re pulling down my sweatpants.
I stare at the pegboard wall above your workbench as you fuck me. That’s some Julia Child shit, I once commented, impressing you with what you thought was knowledge of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, but was really just something I recognized from the movie, Julie & Julia. The garage—an old barn—smells the way I imagine spiders smell, and in the dark I feel their invisible legs crawling all over me. I remember that first morning, and the gunshot, and I wonder where you keep your gun. My mind is in a million places. I try to focus on my body instead, on your body, pressed against me, pressed into me.
After you come, the spiders stop crawling, my mind stills, and for a moment, you give me what I want, your arms around me.
Fig. 6. Two wild zebras grazing along Highway 1.
When I finally drive down the gravel path around four in the afternoon on Sunday, Buttercup chases after my car. You whistle, and she runs back toward you with a loyalty that makes me jealous, though I’m not sure of whom.
It’s later than I usually leave, but we slept in and then, when you suggested pie for breakfast and sheep’s milk lattes, I couldn’t refuse. As we ate in your kitchen, I became attuned to the niggling suspicion that this would be my last visit to your farm.
I turn left off the private road, and knowing thatI’ll hit traffic either way, I take the scenic route, Highway 1.
Dread builds with every mile and by the time I pass the turn-off for Hearst Castle, I feel physically ill–queasy and clammy. This weekend was not an infinite bookshelf, but a mere forty-three hours. I think of the empty apartment that awaits me, the Trader Joe’s Indian food in my freezer that I’ll microwave for dinner. I think about the texts I’ll receive from you later this week, the pictures you always send of your beautiful meals and sunsets and views. Your texts always feel like splinters, but at least real splinters are earned, souvenirs from walking barefoot in your cottage. These splinters–the blurry images you text me–hurt, reminders of something you possess that can only be mine if you choose to share it. And this is unfair because everything that’s mine is yours, ours. I’ve never withheld a thing.
Driving north, I realize that I don’t have a photo of us to put in the album, that we’ve never taken a picture together, not a single one in six months. This realization has just struck me when I see them. The flash of black and white. I swerve over into the shoulder and slam on the brakes.
The pair of zebras are grazing maybe a hundred feet away, one of them eating, the other staring off in the distance. I grab my camera, remove the lens cap, and, with shaking hands, try to focus on them.
You once told me that despite having seen them a dozen times, you’ve never managed to take a picture of them. If I can capture this moment, then I’ll have something you want.
At the last second, the zebra who’s been gazing at the horizon moves its head and looks straight at me, straight through me.
I focus and click.
Rachel Zarrow is a writer of fiction and nonfiction. She received her MFA in fiction from UC Riverside Palm Desert. Her work has appeared in Electric Literature, The Atlantic, and The San Francisco Chronicle, among other places. She is at work on her first novel and lives in San Francisco.
