Famous People #72: Coyotes at the clambake
Kaitlyn: I recently read the Paula Fox novel Desperate Characters because I’ve become obsessed with Jonathan Franzen—I am just begging someone to ask him about the Bright Eyes scene in Freedom!—and it is his favorite book. He describes it at length in a 1996 essay so confusing that he ultimately wrote a supplement apologizing for how confusing it was but didn’t really clarify any of its major points. I don’t remember anything else about that despite having read it less than one week ago.
I tell you this not to brag about the way my smooth, smooth brain repels new information or to bring up noted Franzen friend-rival David Foster Wallace—not even the whole thing where I thought the phrase “dfw summer” inside my own head as a joke and then a couple random people started saying it and Ashley wore a bandana to a dinner—but because that book is about a woman being bitten by a feral cat and then worrying for days about whether she has rabies, or worse, will require painful medicinal shots to prevent rabies. This book resonated with me as much as it did with Jonathan Franzen, though I think for a different reason: He was interested in the future of American “social” fiction, whereas I have had a fascination with rabies ever since reading To Kill a Mockingbird and Their Eyes Were Watching God as the Two Examples of Southern Literature that were assigned to me in high school, a problem exacerbated by the story my parents often tell about brutally murdering a bat with a racquetball racquet inside their first apartment.
All this to say that on the morning of the 4th of July clambake there were coyotes in the yard. It was 10:30 AM and we were sitting around on my parents’ new patio furniture. I was on antibiotics for strep throat. (I got strep throat at a bar… On the dance floor? Or in the bathroom!) I was drinking iced tea and Nathan was drinking a Genesee Brewing Company Ruby Red Kolsch because my dad bought literally 400 of them at the beginning of the summer and is still pushing them into the hands of anyone who enters his wingspan, no matter the time of day or situation. My sister, who had flown in from Texas the night before, had already taken two shots of tequila and was napping. The new puppies—Willie Nelson and Earl—were playing near us, and we all whipped around frantically, looking at them and then the coyotes and then back at the puppies and then at each other while saying things like “Is that a coyote? Are those coyotes? Has anyone ever seen a coyote? I knew there were coyotes, but I’ve never seen one! Aren’t coyotes nocturnal? The coyotes are supposed to be asleep right now! Do the coyotes have rabies? Are the coyotes totally normal but still hungry and wild enough to eat the dogs in front of us?” The coyotes walked around the far corner of the yard for a minute or so, looking confused, then ran back into the woods.
My mom laughed at them and said maybe they were from out of town. For some, the mood was broken. I can’t remember who made a joke about a coyote potentially eating my cousin’s nine-month old baby, but then my cousin made a joke about a coyote potentially eating her baby and I sat there like, “but—” All day I was wandering into conversations gripping half of a warm glass of vodka and Hawaiian Punch-brand lemonade to say things like, “And did you hear? The coyotes?” Remember, this is happening not even 12 miles from the mall.
For hours and hours we ate the 1,250 clams as quickly as my dad could grill them in another part of the yard that is also mere feet from the tree line. We dipped them in shared bowls of melted butter even though a year ago we couldn’t do that and even though I had been officially contagious with a bacterial infection up until only an hour before. We also ate potato salad and macaroni salad and shrimp salad and meatballs and strawberries with tiny Jell-O shots in the middle. We also ate French Onion dip that a moth had landed in, leaving behind tiny moth leg hairs.
My grandma asked me to autograph her copy of The Atlantic, so I chose a page that was an advertisement for a bank and did it very quickly in the kitchen. It was so embarrassing and while I was at it, I texted the elegant women I’d recently eaten dinner with to tell them I had strep throat and I was sorry to say it. I was hurt when one cousin didn’t say hello and when another turned out not to have gotten the vaccine. Also, I was overcome. I was very much hand to gut! For more than a year we suffered alone in our little rooms and now the humidity was like being pushed to the ground by the lid of a Crockpot and the world was still dangerous and my sister still didn’t want me to touch her hair and the Ozone layer probably wasn’t quite “healed” the way some people at the table thought they’d heard it was and the coyotes might be rabid and I didn’t look very sexy at all. And yet: hand to gut. I was thinking stuff like “my family, my family, my family” and I couldn’t believe everything we’d gotten to have back.
Of course, I didn’t love every single opinion everybody shared and I felt embarrassed when I beat my uncle by a lot of points at a card game he’s good at. I was also aware that whenever anybody started to respond to the story about the coyotes I was instantly interrupting them, “Well, that’s what I said. Rabies.” But it’s true that it is what I said and it was also what I thought about much of the day, when I wasn’t thinking cringe like “I’m in awe of the blessings of life on Earth.” We didn’t see the coyotes for the rest of the week, so I have to assume that they ended up feeling fine and getting full somewhere. Or that someone else felt it was urgent to kill them!
I don’t know what Lizzie did to celebrate the 4th. I hope it was good clean fun…