The Man Who Swam with Beavers
Excerpt - The Woman Who Would Marry a Bear

The bride-to-be sat at her kitchen table with Brides magazine, turning down pages and making notes on a pad of paper. There were so many decisions to be made, so many details to attend to. Naturally, she wanted everything about her wedding to be perfect. Suzanne looked in the magazine at the photos of a cherry-blossom wedding, bridesmaids in dotted Swiss and pink butterfly bows. They were heavenly: the armfuls of blossoms, the flower girls with pink cheeks and more blossoms tucked into their golden hair. Her two little nieces were dark, and, to tell the truth, sort of sour-looking, but that was what she had to work with.

            She turned down the page with the cherry blossoms and went on to an article about registering for gifts. She would need to choose silver and china patterns. Already, she could imagine them before her, glowing and glittering down the length of a long, cloth covered table. Serving spoons and butter knives, platters and casseroles, linens, candlesticks, a teapot of Japanese design—the gifts she would need to make her new home.

            Shuffling and snuffling noises began at the rear of the house. She heard the back door creak, movement through the hall. A bear entered the kitchen and rose up on his hind legs before the counter.

            Sudan continued paging through her magazine.

            He was a magnificent bear, six hundred pounds of muscle and gorgeously thick, sun flecked fur. When he stood at the counter, his back to the woman, the fur of his massive back parted down the middle of a dark stripe that ran from the base of his head to his triangular tail. He placed one heavy paw on the counter, pinning a bag of Dorito chips, and tore the wrapping.

            “Don’t make a mess there,” Suzanne said.

            He turned his dish-shaped head and nearsightedly surveyed the room. Pieces of chip stuck to the end of his nose the way bits of rubbed eraser stick to an eraser head. His jaw worked slowly, his mouth opening over pink gums and gleaming canines. Then he dropped to the floor and swung his head back and forth, as though sighting down the long barrel of his pale muzzle. His eyes, the color of old wet pennies, turned from Suzanne to the door to Suzanne again.

            Suzanne ran a hand through the hair at the back of her neck and sighed. “I’ve got so much to do. I absolutely must get the invitation order to the engravers tomorrow. And decide on napkins and matchbooks.”

            The bear walked away, stiff-legged, rolling enormous shoulders. He moved quietly, his claws barely clicking against the linoleum. As he passed through the doorway into the living room, Suzanne stared absently after him and chewed on the end of her pen. She made another note on her pad, examined the polish on one nail, rested her chin on her hand.

            A minute later Suzanne sniffed disagreeably. She pushed back her chair and got to her feet, stomped to the cleaning cabinet below the kitchen sink. She knocked around among the floor waxes and oven cleaners, emerging with a can of room deodorizer. This she sprayed liberally around the kitchen, pointing the fluorocarbon-driven drizzle into the four corners, the air above the counter, and the doorway. She covered every scent of food, home, human, and bear with the fragrance of artificial pines.

A

At the florist’s, Suzanne looked in the glass cases and in picture books. Wildflowers, she’d learned, were very popular this year, and that’s what she wanted.

            “Too puny,” she said, looking at yet another example of a wild orchid.

            The florist rubbed a finger against the corner of her mouth. “They’re smaller than your domestic orchids,” she said. “Wildflowers are. They haven’t been bred for size and shape. What you get is something more delicate, feminine.”

            “Droopy.” Suzanne turned plastic pages in the florist’s selection book. “No daisies. Daisies are passé.”

            “We could fashion, I think, a very nice mixed bouquet, round and full and still natural looking.” The woman fluttered her hands in front of her chest, a gesture that made her look like a pollinating bee. “The wild poppies and orchids will be very nice when they’re softened with something lacy.”

            Suzanne looked dubious. The only thing she liked about the orchids was the idea that someone in a faraway forest was going to hunt them one by one. That was ever so much classier than buying from a greenhouse. She looked again at her list. “I’ve still got the corsages, the boutonnieres, flowers for the church, and the table centerpieces.” She fiipped to the white section of the book again. A label caught her eye. “Bear flower!”

            “A member of the saxifrage family. It grows only in Alaska and parts of northern Canada,” the florist said.

            “That’ll be my married name. Bear.” Suzanne peered more intently at the photo. “Cool—matching flowers.”

            “We have some in the case,” the florist said, going to get them. “I’m sure we can integrate them into your scheme.” She placed them on the table, and they looked at them together with some of the other wildfires. They weren’t really all that attractive, in Suzanne’s opinion. Too stalky. Still, this was the kind of detail that would make her wedding memorable. People would say, years later, Remember the bear flowers at the Bear wedding?

            The door to the shop tinkled, and the bear entered, huge and heavy, his weight shifting as he stepped from paw to paw across the front room and into the back, where the two women leaned over the flowers

            “Here he is!” Suzanne exclaimed. “Look, we found something called a bear fewer. And it’s a wildflower, just like I wanted.”

            The bear raised his massive head to the counter and thrust forward nostrils like a monstrous, oversized electrical outlet, flaring and shrinking, rimmed with bubbles of mucus. The starry petals lifted to meet his inhalation, and then, as he released his breath, were blown back. He tilted his head and opened his mouth, and the flowers disappeared into the space behind his teeth.

            “Stop that!” Suzanne grabbed a roll of the paper used to wrap cut flowers and whopped the bear, hard, across the snout. His head jerked away and the back part of his mouth stretched open so that spittle and a chain of crushed petals spilled out. The fur on the back of his neck and shoulders stiffened, waving like fringe, and his ears flattened against his head.

            “Au,” Suzanne said, sounding like she might cry. “I don’t know why I bother trying to make everything absolutely perfect.” She turned back to the florist.“It’s such a women’s thing, isn’t it? It just takes a female sensibility to care about doing things right, to have any idea about what looks nice.” She waved her hand dismissively at the bear. “They have absolutely no sense.”

            The bear, his head lowered into a corner, opened and closed his jaw with a couple of smacking noises and swallowed the flowers He shook his head as if to shake oV the impact of the paper roll, and the fur on his neck and shoulders relaxed. Still tossing his head, he walked, a little more hurriedly, back the way he’d come.

            Suzanne looked at her watch. “Darn. I’m going to be late to the photographer’s. Just put the damaged flowers on my bill, will you?” In her rush from the shop she forgot, entirely, to leave her swatches of bridesmaid colors.

Suzanne agreed to have her mother help her plan the reception’s dinner menu. The two of them gathered in Suzanne’s living room with lists of caterers, foods, guests, decorations, and other details.

            Suzanne’s mother surveyed her over the top of her glasses. “You are sure you want to go through with this? It’s not too late to change your mind.”

            “Mo-ther!” Suzanne brushed back her hair so that it fell over her arm to her elbow, and then she turned to admire it. “We are not going to have that conversation again. You wanted to help, so this is where you get to participate. We need to get a menu pinned down.”

            “I just hope you’ve taken everything into account. Compatibility is such a big part of marriage. Your father and I . . . ”

            Suzanne covered her ears. “I don’t need this lecture.”

            “Well, just listen for a moment. What if, for example, he really loved sports and you really loved opera. You might have a basic incompatibility.”

            “No way. I hate opera. C’mon. Let’s get serious here.”

            “This is what mothers are for.”

            “No, it’s not. I have it right here.” Suzanne waved a glossy book at her mother. “The authors of Planning Your Wedding say, and I quote, ‘the role of mother is moral support and to do those things that are delegated by the bride.’”

            Her mother looked at the closed book. “You memorized that?”

            “Or words to that effect.” Suzanne took a long swallow from a Pepsi, then set the can back on the table. “I don’t think I want roast beef. Then you get into a thing where it’s too rare for some people and not rare enough for others, and it’s just kind of gross anyway, when they’ve got a guy carving it up right there in front of people and blood running all over the place.”

            “Are you sure he, you know, doesn’t have any bad habits? What if you find out later he’s got some annoying little habit that you just can’t live with?”

            “Like what?”

            “I don’t know. Your Aunt Ruth married a man who never slept. He was always wanting to go do something in the middle of the night, or he’d just bang around the house and keep her awake. He wore her right out.”

            “Not a problem. He sleeps a lot.”

            “Well, that could be a problem, too.”

            “He snores.”

            “He snores?”

            “That’s what I said. But I know what to do. I just won’t let him lie on his back. Ever hear of sewing a tennis ball into the back of a nightshirt?”

            Suzanne’s mother looked slightly scandalized.

            “Ma.” Suzanne made eye contact. “I got that from Ann Landers.” She drained the rest of her Pepsi and tossed the can across the room into an open sack of garbage. She rummaged through her purse for her makeup kit, snapped open her compact, and examined her face. She touched a finger to one mascaraed eyelash.

            “You don’t want roast beef,” her mother said. “What would you like instead?”

            “I was thinking of veal. It has such couture, it’s just so much better looking. Some bright vegetables would go well with it. I want those really light, flaky rolls. And the butter absolutely needs to be those little balls, like tiny scoops of ice cream. Are you writing this down? Then we can call the caterer.”

            Suzanne’s mother started a new list on a yellow pad.

            Suzanne, dangling her leg over the arm of the sofa, discovered the beginning of a run in her pantyhose. She stretched and pulled at the material to draw the run up and down her leg, and then she ripped at the hole to widen its track.

            “We used to put a little clear nail polish on our runs to stop them,” her mother said.

            Suzanne pulled back her skirt and stretched the hose to draw the run right up to her hip. “I love to do this,” she said. “Did I tell you I decided on my silver pattern?” She fumbled for her magazine and turned to a dogeared page. “Victoria. It’s me, don’t you think?”

            “Whatever you like,” her mother said, handing the magazine back.

            Suzanne read, “‘Sterling gives your table an aura of romance and a sense of heritage.’ Not to mention that it’s worth a lot of dough.” She stood up and stripped off her pantyhose, wadded them into a ball, and stuffed them into the garbage sack.

Her friends, coworkers, and female relatives gave Suzanne a bridal shower. She sat in the center of a cheerful circle and opened gifts as they were passed to her. She attended to each with ceremony, lingering over its unwrapping—pulling apart designer papers and ribbons, digging through boxes of Styrofoam peanuts, unfolding sheets of bubble wrap, sorting through layers of colored tissue paper and bleached white cardboard.

            Like buried treasure, each present finally emerged from the depths of its packaging. Lingerie, curling irons, a disposable camera, an electronic address book, plastic recipe boxes, Plexiglas picture frames, an electric juicer—the essentials and delights of married life. Each was passed around to choruses of admiration and approval. Emptied boxes and crumpled wrappings piled higher and higher, filled corners, overflowed the room into the next, then the apartment into the outside hall. Suzanne felt faint with happiness.

            They had tea and cakes and told of other showers, weddings, babies, new boyfriends, sales, and the price of red peppers. Someone recommended a place where the bridesmaids could have their shoes dyed.

            “There he is!” someone said, and they all rushed to the windows.

            On the sidewalk below, the bear was walking, the dark stripe down his back shifting from side to side with the sway of his shoulders and haunches. From five stories up, surrounded by concrete and cars, he didn’t look particularly large or impressive. The women watched him step oV the curb into the space between a new Buick and a minivan and then, when another car rushed past, retreat to the sidewalk again. He stepped slowly, almost gingerly, as though the pavement was hard on his feet. He sniffed at a spindly tree surrounded by a wire fence and then continued past it, head down. His fur, in the shadow of the buildings and against the gray street, looked dusty and dull, colorless.

            The women watched and were embarrassed. More than anything, he looked to them like a street person—dull, slow, meandering. Finally, Suzanne’s best friend said, “He certainly looks . . . furry.”

            “He looks very cuddly,” another girl said.

            “Yes, cuddly!” They all agreed. They went back to their tea and cakes.

Suzanne bought a new used car—a big, heavy American sedan with a powerful engine and an oil leak. It got twelve miles to each gallon of gas and needed a quart of oil with every fill-up, but she didn’t mind.

            Her mother and sister came to help her finalize her wedding plans. They stood in the driveway, and she showed them the car. It started with a varoom, belching stinky black exhaust. She revved the engine, backed the car down the driveway, opened and shut the electric windows, and ran the air conditioner. She made her mother and sister get into the backseat and listen to the tape deck, loud, while she turned up the speakers one at a time so they could hear just what top-of-the-line quality they were.

            “It’s big,” her sister said, when they were standing in the driveway again.

            “We’ll need the room,” Suzanne said. “Family-size. Besides, I want a safe car. Not one of those little things that will fold up like a tin can if you run into something. If I’m in an accident, I want to be the one to walk away from it.”

            They went inside and talked details. Decisions had to be made about housing out-of-town guests and which of the girl cousins would be in charge of the guestbook. Suzanne sent her sister to call the videographer to make sure he knew what time to come. While her sister was out of the room, she showed her mother the gifts she’d bought for her attendants—perfume bottles with real ivory knobs.

            Suzanne’s sister came back and offered to buy birdseed for tossing after the wedding.

            “Are you kidding?” Suzanne made a face. “I’m not having birdseed at my wedding. I’ve already got the pouches, monogrammed and everything, for the rice. This is a class act, you know—strictly traditional. Strictly white rice.”

            “With birdseed,” her sister said, “the birds can clean it up off the walks. When they eat rice, it swells in their stomachs.”

            “So tell the greedy little buzzards to stay away. This isn’t their wedding.” She turned to her mother. “Can you imagine?”

            “Whatever you like, dear. It’s your day.”

            “Hey!” Suzanne bounced to her feet. “Did I show you the coffee grinder I got?” She ushered her mother and sister into the kitchen and ran the grinder. She left it running while she demonstrated her new coffeemaker, espresso machine, electric knife, mixer, can opener, blender, food processor, juicer, vegetable slicer, ice cream maker, and vacuum cleaner—one and another, all at the same time, all at top speed.

            Outside, the bear stood on the manicured, pest-proofed lawn and listened to the roar. He watched the electric meter beside the back door spin around and around. He paced along one side of the house, turned and paced back. A low growl rumbled in his throat and then he shook his head and made a chopping sound with his teeth.

            Suzanne wasn’t through. She rushed from counter to table to closet and shelf, plugging in new appliances, pushing buttons, turning switches. She popped popcorn in the hot-air popper, fired up the singing tea kettle, moved the exhaust fan to high. She turned on the radio, the minitelevision, the larger television, and the cd player. Running past doorways, she hit light switches and threw closed-curtain rooms into a blaze of humming fluorescence. In the bathroom, she blasted and whirlpooled a tub of hot water and set the hair dryer, electric toothbrush, and fan going. She snapped, pushed, and adjusted every variety of button and dial until the entire house throbbed.

            Finally, she stood taut and trembling in the middle of it all, arms flung fisted into the air. “Yes, yes, YES!” she cried.

            Had the curtains not been closed to keep the sunlight from fading the furniture, and had every electrical appliance and entertainment in the house not been pulsing at top speed, the women might have seen or heard the bear beside the house. But as it was, not one of them noticed him crash through a rhododendron bush and run across the lawn. He ran fast, as fast as bearly possible, half again as fast as any human. His body stretched into speed, propelled by his tremendous muscles and powerful heart. Divots of torn grass scattered in his wake.

            He looked back just once, a wide-eyed, wary, hunted look that showed crescents of white at the corners of both eyes, and then he was gone into the woods. He ran into fading light, into deep, soft, far forest, into wilderness.

The wedding was quietly called off.

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