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Through my mother’s high-pitched ventriloquizing, Brownie would offer foul commentary. Sometimes Brownie, who was actually a light beige, would join us at the breakfast table for cheeseburgers and Pringles. She even had a plush toy named Brownie-her lamb daughter, an ovine teddy bear bought on sale at JCPenney on Black Friday. A waiter would tell us about the mutton special, and she would declare, as if we had religious objections, “Heavens, no, we don’t eat lamb,” and give us a wry, dire smile. When pleased with a good grade or a clean room, she might baaa and exclaim, “Hoof check!” and my brother and I would hold up our “hooves,” our hands making a sort of live-long-and-prosper sign. And for every holiday, my mother managed to buy each of us a moose-themed Hallmark card to give my father, who had a bushy Tom Selleck “moose-stache.” Not a creature was stirring, not even a moose, one card read. When I was in grade school, my grandparents and I would squeak and grrr at one another over the phone-we were trying, I think, to express inexpressible affection, a love blurred with play, made urgent by Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. A brilliant Army colonel, first in his class at West Point, he pawed at the air, growling like a grizzly. It began, maybe, when she was a child riding on her father’s back past the dining room table into the kitchen. In ordinary ways, usually egged on by my mother, my family’s animals expressed themselves through their human counterparts. Gnawing on the white vertical bars, I would stare at the periscope of a neck, the synthetic tufts of black and yellow. Beside the door was a small giraffe, a holdover from my nursery, where my crib cage protected me from the zoo animals stalking the wallpaper. She said the same of the nautical, colonialist theme she chose for my room: Christopher Columbus’s ship framed above the twin bed’s baseboard, a fake brass dive helmet on the dresser. In true Florida fashion, my poor brother was a mosquito, though my mother decorated his bedroom with mallard ducks. My father was a moose my mother a sheep my grandfather a bear my grandmother a mouse. Not a pet, mind you-they were too much mess and fuss-but a goofy mascot, an unspiritual spirit animal, which together seemed caricatures of power and powerlessness. But more than anything, as my thirty-fifth birthday neared, I wanted to see otters in the wild.Įveryone in my family but me had an animal when I was growing up in Florida. My mind replayed the young Pacific Heights doctor telling me on a date, while cradling my head in his hands, “You’re so cute I should take a box cutter to your face-to bring you down some notches.” I had to get away from San Francisco-to get away from men, to go smell the cold ocean and put my arm in it up to my elbow. Then I raked at my chest hair and took a shirtless selfie with the phone I used to text my mother and read Shakespeare. I leaned to one side, heard my restless father say, “All my life I’ve wanted to belong to something.” Heard my Castro therapist declare, “I don’t think you know who you are.” Her clothes, her hair, and her armchair were all black, so during our sessions, she was a just pale face. I found myself shirtless one night looking into the bathroom mirror, grabbing hold of one love handle and pushing it back. Loneliness would pulse in my teeth until they ached. I was hella lonely, as they would say there, in my Bay Area neighborhood of baby strollers pushed by techies staring down at their phones, in the swipe-left-swipe-right world of cyberspace where I spent too much time. “I dreamed in a dream of a city where all the men were like brothers”