Slip of the Tongue by Katie Haegele

Author:Katie Haegele
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Microcosm Publishing
Published: 2014-04-08T04:00:00+00:00

14.

To Name Something Is To Own It

I visited San Francisco with my boyfriend, Joe, not too long ago. We were there so that I could participate in a reading series at the main branch of the city’s beautiful public library, built a hundred years ago and rebuilt, in a massive modernization in chrome, in the late 1980s. We arrived the day before, just to be on the safe side, and settled into our rented apartment in a modest and quiet residential neighborhood that was mostly Asian—Chinese and Japanese. We were two blocks from the ocean and a ten-minute walk from the San Francisco Zoo, and since we had a whole day to kill before the reading, and since I was kind of nervous about doing it, we decided to go to the zoo.

I don’t think I’d been to a zoo for more than twenty years. Maybe close to thirty. We went when we were very little kids, I guess, to the Philadelphia Zoo, but I don’t even really have my own memories of that. When I think of “the zoo,” I think about my mother’s stories of taking my little sister’s class there when she was in the eighth grade, and how annoyingly rambunctious the boys were, and how Michael Donahue climbed a fence and reached over to try to pull feathers out of a peacock’s tail. He nearly got one but my mom caught him in time.

This zoo was different from the zoo of my imagination. It was a bright, breezy September day, with that clear-eyed California sunshine that shows you everything like an X-ray, even while it’s pretending to be all laid-back and gentle. We went on a weekday, so it wasn’t noisy and hectic, only a few families and here and there a mother pushing a baby stroller. There were no cotton candy vendors, which was the other thing I guess I remembered about the zoo: cotton candy. This was a more grown-up place than I expected it to be.

Joe and I stood for quite a while and watched a giraffe, who was new to the zoo, get to know her new herd-mates. She was in her own pen, separate from the others, but she kept bowing her long neck down over the fence to let one of the baby giraffes nuzzle her. When she got nervous she’d dance backward like a horse in slow motion. We saw some rhinos standing there being boring, the same color and shape and, seemingly, texture as the tan rocks around them. We saw a giant anteater and heard a guy say “His tongue is hella long!” and his girlfriend say “Don’t say hella.” We even saw some peacocks.

And then, booming and echoey, we heard something like a person’s voice exploding over a loudspeaker, like the sound of the state fair from a distance. But it wasn’t a person, we didn’t think. We stopped and looked at each other.

“It’s a bear,” Joe said. “Or … I don’t know. It’s really loud! Let’s go see.

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