Beauty is not a virtue. And beauty is not in the eye of the beholder. Beauty is a fact like height, or symmetry, or hair color. Understand that I am not bragging when I say I am the most beautiful woman in the bar.
One would naturally assume that the first-person narrator of this story is a narcissist of some sort. Maybe not over there on the sociopathic end of the spectrum, but somewhere on it, anyway. It may be true, in fact, because her narration is constantly turned inward on herself. But she means it when it she says she’s not bragging and it is apparently true when that she is the most beautiful woman in the bar. (Of course, it is also true that a quick peek into any bar in the world is enough to satisfy the curiosity of a visiting alien that this is the not the place where the epitome of human beauty is likely to be found.) Reading further, however, gets one to the point where the inward gaze is directed outward toward the title figure. The most beautiful woman in the bar and the smallest man in the world turn out to have more in common than one might suspect and it is this shock of the unexpected that defines the stories in this collection.
Mrs. Martin's legs wrapped around him, and her body threatened to devour not just his personal part, but all the rest of him too. Invisible flames curled around him like a late summer heat that wilted flowers, singed grasses, and cracked bare earth. As his body combusted, he watched the backyard, through the window glass, and soothed his eyes upon the cool emerald expanse of the perfect lawn.
By “other animals” the title typically refers to actual animals. Plenty of animals pop up in these stories in addition to plenty of women. But that is not to suggest that it is a collection of stories only about female characters. “The Perfect Lawn” does feature two female characters quite prominently: a high school cheerleader and her alcoholic, chain-smoking mother. But the key character here is a teenage boy, Kevin, who idolizes the pretty young cheerleader to an extent well deserving of being called creepy. He’s a stalker, there is no other appropriate term. Surprises abound here as they do in the story of the perpetual beauty pageant winner above. Things are not necessarily what they seem: Kevin’s not so bad and the object of his unrequited love is hardly deserving of it. The ending quoted above is a shock though in retrospect it should not be. But it is at first and that is the key to the power of these stories; they can shock and then, with time, seem perfectly natural.
By entangling myself in the arms of something like a hundred men, I hoped to find one who would satisfy me, one who could give me a kind of pleasure which did not make me want to jump off a high building. The promise of each seemed great, but each failed me in turn. Once in a while, in the heated strangeness of passion, I felt the presence of my own male part, coexisting with my female organs.
Nowhere in the collection does the intersection of women, men and animals collide a dead end that leaves a mangled, complicated and almost indeterminate wreck than in “Gorilla Girl.” It is a story told by a young woman of great beauty and greater rage who is only barely just able to contain that wrath until she finds the perfect outlet in a carnival sideshow playing (but not really just playing) a feral jungle woman almost more animal than human. Which describes the narrator almost as well. “Gorilla Girl” becomes the symbolic escape from passivity which imprisons so many of the other women who are exposed to the other animals in the stories.
She is that woman everybody knows and—if they were honest—fears. The one with the stare that can cripple all pretensions to masculine superiority without the addition of a single word. The girl whose very refusal to back down is enough to defuse even the most incendiary of potential conflicts. The “Gorilla Girl” would not do well crossing over into the other stories because she would not put up with the woman who have allowed life to happen to them much less the men they happen to share lives with.
