Once in New York I saw a work of experimental theater. I didn’t do that kind of thing often but you know how it is, you get dragged to things. A friend of mine did the set design. I don’t know. Something like that.
It was in a black box theater under a bar in Ridgewood, the really industrial part near the cemetery where every business is either an auto repair shop or a nightclub. The bar advertised that it hosted beer pong tournaments. The theater underneath had no stage, just a part of the room where you could put chairs and a part of the room where you could put actors. There were three buckets sitting there when we walked in. One held dirt, one held water, and one held what looked like blood.
As the play began—no, not a play, it was a one-woman show, part of a festival of short one-acts that an underground theater company was putting on—something strange happened. The woman on the absence of a stage was my mother. She was a sinewy Bushwick movement artist in her early thirties, but she was my mother. She spoke with my mother’s voice.
She was credited in the program as “The Vegetarian,” which was also the title of the show. Later I asked the friend who invited me for a copy of the script. This is what he gave me:
THE VEGETARIAN
[The Vegetarian enters from stage left, walking past the three buckets containing dirt, water, and blood. We will not call it “earth;” we will call it “dirt.” It is not the earth. It has been taken away from the earth. It is dirt.
The Vegetarian takes her mark and begins to speak.]
I grew up on a dairy farm in north Georgia. It wasn’t good land. During a drought the cows would graze right through the brittle grass and the thin layer of dark, rich, beet-tasting topsoil to the red clay underneath. And there was a pond on our property where the cows would shit, and when my father fished catfish out of that pond they tasted like cow shit.
From about the age of eight I helped out. One of my jobs was to herd the calves when they were sick and give them their medicine out of a bottle. Calves are sweet. They’re dumb, but they’re sweet. They let you pet them. They’re not skittish like colts. But they’re not as smart as goats. My father used to say that goats have the capacity to choose evil, and so when they don’t, we can love them for it. Cows are too stupid to make a choice, so while we might love them, we always have to pity them too. And then he used to say that that’s how God loves us.
[The Vegetarian dumps the bucket of dirt out on the floor and begins shaping it into rows.]
Anyway, I had a pet goat named Gertie. I raised her from when she was a kid. She ate garbage, scraps, whatever you fed her. Sometimes I’d feed her pecans, which I wasn’t supposed to do for multiple reasons. But she’d eat from my hand. It was sweet.
My other job was to deal with the chickens.
[She scoops some blood up with her hands and pours it, ceremoniously, onto the rows of dirt.]
We didn’t raise chickens, but my father was a trained veterinarian, and sometimes after he did some work for another farmer they’d give him chickens as partial payment. Chickens stink. My mother didn’t like them. There was something, in her mind, much more genteel about being a dairy farmer than being a poultry farmer. And she had a beautiful garden, with roses and tiger lilies and lilacs in addition to the squash and tomatoes and beans and okra, and she didn’t want the stink of chicken to cover the scent of the flowers. So she always insisted that Daddy just go ahead and slaughter them. And he did. He cut their heads off almost as soon as he got a batch.
But the thing about chickens is they’re so dumb they don’t know they’re dead, right? You know that expression. Running around like a chicken with its head cut off.
[She acts out this motion, tripping over her own feet.]
Well, it was my job to chase their poor headless bodies around until they fell down dead for real. Once I chased a chicken into Mama’s calla lilies. She did not like that. The blood got on the petals, and when I wiped it away I bruised the plant. She did not like that at all.
It wasn’t ugly, though. People who didn’t grow up like that are always horrified by that story, but it wasn’t ugly at all. I think it’s better to see something die before you eat it. You can’t look away. You can’t pretend you don’t know what it looks like. There was one time, though…
[Thoughtfully, she reaches once more into the bucket of blood, cupping it and letting it fall through her fingers.]
Uncle Bill was over for Sunday dinner. He was a lot younger than my father. A bachelor. We were pals, mostly, but he liked to play pranks. And we were all eating dinner, which was meat and potatoes and biscuits and vegetables from the garden, which was what all our meals were—if we had lasagna, that was exotic—and so nothing seemed unusual. The meat was good. A little bit gamier than usual. A little bit hairier. Kind of like you were chewing on a whole hindquarter, fur and all. But I ate it. Uncle Bill was looking at me sort of intently. He asked me if I liked it. I said I did. Likes and dislikes weren’t something my parents were known to tolerate. And Uncle Bill burst out laughing and slapping his knee. “That’s your pet goat, baby girl!” he said. “That’s Gertie that you’re eating!”
Well, I started crying. So did my sister, but she kept eating. Shoveling chunk after chunk of Gertie into her mouth. And eventually I did, too, because food got eaten, and somehow I would rather eat Gertie than have her leftover and fed to the outside cats.
My mother chewed Uncle Bill out. She didn’t like to talk about that stuff at the dinner table.
My father said nothing, just ate his dinner. Later, when he was having his pie and coffee, he said to me, “Honey, you know why we raise goats.”
[The Vegetarian lays down for a while in the mix of dirt and blood, then slowly gets up.]
I haven’t told that story in a while. I don’t particularly like telling it. A few years later I went away to college and I stopped eating meat. It wasn’t an ethical thing, exactly. But after growing up on a farm I got to a point where I just didn’t like how it felt to chew on a muscle. I was pre-med, and I had to learn all the anatomy, and I just—well. I couldn’t help thinking, if I saw someone eating a chicken thigh: I know what that muscle does. I know how that joint works, what those tendons feel like.
For a while I really liked being pre-med. I was good at science. I could memorize things. And I had good hands—I thought I might be a surgeon. I think I would’ve been a good doctor. But I wouldn’t have been a perfect one. I wouldn’t have done everything right, every time. And as soon as I realized that it was inevitable that one day one of my patients would die, I knew I couldn’t be a doctor, because I can never let stuff like that go.
I messed up, once, when my father asked me for help putting a lame mule to sleep, and instead of dying quickly the poor thing lingered, moaning out in pain. I still dream about that mule. I can still hear it crying.
[She begins shaping the wet dirt in her hands, molding it. A nervous action.]
Besides, one of my biology classes, it had this cow. It was technically a living cow. It had one of its sides cut out, the skin and the outer layer of flesh stripped away, and there was a pane of glass put in, and so you could see how its insides worked. Its heart pumping, its stomachs ruminating. All of it shiny, red, purple, pulsating, raw, on display, like a shop window. It was like Schrodinger’s cat, alive and dead at the same time, but there was no box, so you could see it dying.
[She wets her hands, this time with blood, and continued molding the mud.]
I didn’t become a doctor. Instead I got married. I moved up north with my husband to an apartment in the middle of a city. And eventually I insisted that we get a dog. For the kids, of course. I wanted them to have a piece of what I had as a child—to grow up with living things. I would’ve liked either a big shelter mutt or something smart and dignified like a border collie, but we had to get something that made sense for the apartment, so we got a tiny, finicky, yappy dog. A social climber. A sycophant. A lap dog that was too nervous to sit on anyone’s lap. And I hated that dog, because it loved me more than it loved my children.
[She tosses the lumps of blood and dirt onto the floor and begins to trample them.]
I couldn’t forgive it for that. It was always whining for attention, but it would run past the kids to simper at me instead. And it would shit on the floor. Growing up I’d never thought of cleaning up dog shit because dogs stayed outside. But suddenly we were all cleaning up dog shit. Almost every day. The damn thing had digestive issues.
[She dumps the bucket of water onto the floor and motions as if mopping. If the audience gets wet, so be it. They can pick their feet up.]
And then one night I was cooking dinner with my daughter, teaching her the basics like my mother had done. I was showing her the best way to chop vegetables, because there’s a trick to it—you have to curl your fingers and use your knuckles as a buffer against the knife. We had onions, peppers, carrots, fresh herbs. There was garlic sizzling in olive oil on the stove. The kitchen smelled just like a kitchen should. It was a perfect moment, even if the dog was underfoot, skulking for scraps like it always did. A perfect, beautiful moment.
But then my daughter was distracted by something outside the window—she said later that she saw something falling, something big, and she thought it was a person, but there weren’t any reports of accidents or suicides on our block so I don’t know what it could have been besides an unusually large bird—but she was distracted, and she forgot to curl her fingers, and as the knife came down it sliced right through her left ring finger and severed it at the second knuckle.
She screamed. I screamed. The blood pooled around the onions, staining them red just like the chicken blood stained the calla lilies. I wrapped her hand in a towel, put as much pressure on it as I could, and shouted at my husband to call 911. And then I looked for the finger. It had landed on the edge of the counter, pale and terrible, and as I reached for it my hands that had always been so steady began to shake.
[She holds her hands aloft, as if afraid of them.]
I am ashamed to say that I knocked it to the floor. And quick as anything the dog darted forward and ate it.
I didn’t even know, at the time, if the doctors would have been able to reattach it or not. But that didn’t matter. It was the manner, I think. The dog ate my daughter’s finger in exactly the same way I’d seen it eat a sausage I dropped the week before. I knew intellectually that as soon as it was cut off it was meat, just meat, we’re all just meat, and the dog was only doing what dogs do. But the rage I felt! It erased the fear, the panic, the shock. All I felt was rage.
I reached down and tried to pry the dog’s jaws open, but they wouldn’t budge. I yanked harder. The animal squealed like it always did when it misbehaved. I couldn’t even see if the finger was still in its mouth or if it had swallowed it. And so I put my hands around its neck, and I squeezed. I don’t know if I wanted to squeeze the finger out of its throat, or what, but I squeezed. It made a terrible sound. My daughter, I remember, was crying.
And then, without even realizing what I was doing, the dog was dead.
My daughter ended up being fine. The ring finger isn’t actually very functional, especially on the nondominant hand, so the only thing she had to give up was piano. We did have to get her in therapy, though. Partially because of the finger and partially because of the dog. She’d never seen one of her parents kill an animal before. She wasn’t like me. Her childhood wasn’t like mine.
If we’d been in the country, we could’ve buried the dog out back and no one would’ve asked any questions. But in the city every square inch of dirt had someone to answer for it. So we brought it to—no one ever believes this part—a pet crematorium. A place with rainbows painted everywhere and an FAQ pamphlet that included questions like “What will happen to my pet when the Rapture comes?” And we had to explain to the people who worked there what had happened, no, we do not strangle animals for fun, not at all, I do not make a habit of it, no ma’am, no sir, there were some extreme and extenuating circumstances that preceded this tragic accident which will never, ever be repeated. And finally, after all the questions and red tape and a $200 fee, both the dog and my daughter’s finger were truly gone, burnt up, the smoke from their disparate flesh mingling and rising over one of the outer boroughs.
I’m still a vegetarian.
•
After the show, while my friends had a cigarette and complained about how overdone and cheesy the whole Southern gothic thing was, I called my dad.
“Hey, sweetie. To what do I owe this pleasure?” he said.
“Just killing time. And I wanted to ask something. Do you remember how Coco died?”
My father sighed. “Poor Coco. We had to put her down a couple years ago.”
“Why was that?”
“She just couldn’t hang on anymore. She was blind. She was in a lot of pain. And, frankly, she was too much work.” He sighed again. “Tell me, do you miss her?”
I wanted the answer to be yes, so I said yes. “Me too,” my dad said.
Next I called my brother.
“What?” he said. “I’m busy.”
“I just want to check something,” I said. “First of all, did you write an experimental play that’s up at a tiny basement theater in Ridgewood?”
My brother, who was a securities trader who lived in a glass tower in FiDi, did not answer for a moment. I heard a keyboard clacking. I heard an online video game. “I’m going to let you figure that one out,” he said.
“Due diligence.”
“What could possibly prompt you to ask that?”
“It reminded me of Mom. The play. The main character seemed like it was based on her.”
“Maybe she wrote it,” he said.
“Uh, maybe. Second question, do you remember how Coco died?”
“Yeah. Mom killed her,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“She was sick of her throwing up all the time so she convinced Dad that she was terminally ill and needed to be put down.”
“When?”
“Like, high school?”
“Are you sure that’s what happened?” I said.
“I have about seventy-five percent epistemological certainty. Also, I have to go,” my brother said. “I have to go trade stocks. Then I have to eat a steak dinner with my girlfriend, who is a burgeoning model before she is an NYU junior.”
“Okay,” I said, “Tell her to stay in school.”
Finally I called my mom. I did not know how to ask what I wanted to ask. I knew my mother had not strangled our shih tzu. I rubbed my ring finger with my thumb. The flesh was intact but scarred, and the silvery ring of repaired skin at the base was numb. Rubbing it felt like touching someone else’s hand.
“Hi, sweetie,” she said. “Is everything okay?”
“Everything’s fine. I just wanted to ask if you’d written a play.”
“Nope.”
“Okay,” I said. “I figured that was probably the case. This play I just saw reminded me of you, that’s all.”
“How so?” she asked. Her voice warm, husky, slightly Southern.
“It was about growing up on a farm in Georgia. There was one bit where the main character is tricked into eating her pet goat.”
Mom sighed. “Sadly, that happens to a lot of people.”
I did not ask what I had meant to ask; I decided I liked the answer I already had.
After we said we loved each other and hung up I rejoined the group. Everyone was smoking and arguing and talking shit. I bummed a cig and listened. One of my friends, a committed vegan, was in the middle of a long tirade. “It’s ridiculous to have ‘No animals were harmed in the making of this film’ in the credits if there was industrial deli meat on the craft services table,” he was saying. Right then the performer walked past. I didn’t know, at the time, if she had written the play. I looked at her, wanting to speak, wanting to ask her if she knew me, how she knew me, where she might have heard that story—and we made eye contact. And maybe I was wrong, but she seemed to recognize me. She held my gaze as cars rushed by, their headlights flashing, the white and yellow light reflecting in her eyes, which seemed, in every passing moment, to be the eyes of both a woman and an animal. Maybe I was wrong, though. I’d once mistaken a bird for a falling man.
Mariah Kreutter
Mariah Kreutter is a writer living in New York. Her fiction has appeared in The Drift and Joyland, among other places.