Animal Stories

Animal Stories Summary | Detailed Summary

The story opens with the narrator, Jamie, describing his reaction to the news that his mother has a brain tumor. He hopped in his car and drove recklessly, presumably toward the hospital, though he does not say. Already we sense his ambivalence toward his mother, as he tells us that his self-destructiveness and lapses of concentration are traits he got from her—"any man's mother is a source of grief until she dies"—yet he does not seem to regard these as faults, simply as parts of his personality.

At the hospital, Jamie's mother plays with the remote for the television, seeming not to know its purpose until Jamie uses it to turn on a nature video. A doctor arrives to ask how much his mother has forgotten since the day before. This launches Jamie into reviewing some memories of his own, as he describes himself as an overweight eccentric who attracts "nuts," and who has "interests," particularly in nature, in lieu of a job; he sees it as a choice of thinking over working. Now that his mother is losing her memories, he says, he has begun shedding things of his own, such as cars and clothes, to better "think" about what's important in life.

The doctor announces that the tumor is growing fast, and that he wishes to perform a biopsy to determine the extent of the malignancy. He seems grateful to be distracted by the nature video and identifies the birds as plovers, to which Jamie's mother responds, cryptically, "not exactly."

Jamie tells us that his mother began acting strangely in 1977, when God told her to watch out for doctors. Her ex-husband, David, Jamie's father, is a doctor. It was not until just a year before the story opens, however, that Jamie's father began noticing that she was, as he put it, "losing little things," a bit of an understatement considering that one of the things she has lost is the fact that she and David have been divorced for years. She also, while vacationing in Nova Scotia, abruptly left the bed and breakfast while her unsuspecting boyfriend lay napping, and flew to London for no reason at all except that, as she later told Jamie, she thought she might like to meet the Queen. Jamie recalls the precise dates during which his mother believed in God—the year she left one-word messages from Him in people's mailboxes; that same year, David moved out, and Jamie's girlfriend and his friend Tom moved in, and the four of them spent the summer drinking gin until "what happened would not be remembered the next day."

Jamie's mother does not want the biopsy. She has decided that since her time left is limited, she should write a book on how animals remember. Jamie says his mother loves animals because they cannot remember in the same way we do, except for dogs, which she says learn from people. The two watch a video about "disoriented and irresponsible" shrews that have become narcotized by industrial fallout. Later, during a video about animals that use disguise, camouflage or trickery to survive, Jamie's mother asks where the bathroom can be found, and Jamie escorts her, guiding her warily through a hospital that he imagines not as a place of healing but as a dangerous place teeming with danger and disease. Animals are happy because they have forgotten, and do not even know it, says Jamie's mother. She has been aiding Jamie in his attempt to forget things, teaching him little tricks that will go into her animal book. He admits that he frequently lives not by "being himself," as his mother had counseled before her illness, but by pretending to be someone else entirely, sometimes living as a character from a book he has read. He has given up trying to define himself by what he has done in the past, later saying, "nothing is less like him" than the things he has done.

Jamie explains himself as someone who simply does not see things clearly enough. He says that even in grade school the teachers were concerned that he might have some sort of disability or medical condition, something that seemed both fleeting and variable and thus impossible to diagnose. He likens himself to a broken car waiting for a part and implies that, but for that one missing component, he might be a genius. Since it remains missing, he has given up trying to improve his life, or even caring about it. Reminiscing about the summer of 1977, Jamie tells us that his girlfriend, Alice, whose IQ apparently qualifies her as a genius, demanded sex three times a day to stay sane.

Frightened by Jamie's mother's seemingly "desperate" urge to cook during that year, the others banished her from the kitchen. Tom the roommate took up meal duty, making salads to go with the gin they all drank while Jamie's mother talked about the divorce. David has told Jamie that there is no point in worrying about what he is not, saying "You can either be you or someone else," a piece of advice that Jamie derides, despite having just told us that in fact that is how he lives his life—as someone else. He says his mother and her family are the real thinkers, not his father or his family. The mother and David interact as if they are two friendly strangers, with David stopping by to work in the garden while the mother watches him from upstairs, and occasionally joining them in the basement where they spent most of their time to escape the summer heat. Jamie's mother blames her brain tumor on the events of that summer, and Jamie finds that logical. By then, however, she had already begun losing her memory, not recognizing the people she lived with—even Jamie—and enjoying them all as "new friends."

Jamie's mother also blames the tumor on her inability to forget. The doctor comes into her hospital room and warns her that without the biopsy and following operation, she will end up losing her awareness, losing herself: "a fate worse than death." She watches a video about the symbiotic relationship between sloths and the insects that live in their fur, and then covers her face with a magazine until the doctor leaves. Afterwards, a pair of drug dealers visit the other patient in the room, leaving her a paper bag and commenting on the valuable drugs to be found in the room. The video has moved on to discussing a bird that is hampered by the fact that it can only move in one direction.

In August of that gin-soaked summer in the basement, David mowed down all the flowers he had cultivated during the summer and never again visited the house. Jamie's mother says David is cruel, but Jamie sees it as an act of self-recrimination, and he is impressed to learn that you can undo so much hard work in an instant and walk away as if nothing had happened, and start over. David warns Jamie not to listen to his mother's ideas, or he will end up like her. Jamie describes the house and its decaying abandoned-looking condition as a place where the inhabitants are blanketed by a heavy sadness.

According to Jamie, people who know each other too well end up talking about nothing, merely exchanging facts and common knowledge. When the doctor warns Jamie's mother that she must leave the hospital if she continues to refuse treatment, Jamie thinks about animals, and how they are only sad when caged or too much exposed to people, and that animals seem better at adapting and surviving since they seem to know that "whatever we lose is returned to us in time."

He recalls, that during the summer of 1977, his mother taught them all to savor sadness as sweetness, something unavoidable that should be treated as a friend. They all gave up meat when his mother started believing in reincarnation, and spent their time revealing bits of their lives to each other, such as learning about Tom's mother's four unsuccessful suicide attempts. Occasionally they traveled to the Goodwill store for clothes or trinkets to amuse themselves, turning themselves into "walking collages of other people's lives" and laughing at themselves.

Jamie's mother tells the frustrated doctor that she is packing to leave. She fills her suitcase with not with her own clothes, which she gives to her fellow patient, but with things belonging to the hospital, while in the background a video describes the mating habits of the cormorant and some of the stranger creatures of Madagascar. She is happy to leave, although the doctor predicts that she will soon return when the pain becomes unbearable, at which point she will probably be beyond treatment. Jamie thinks about "the good kind of sadness"—the kind his mother taught him—as a shooting star, and is grateful for all that he has forgotten, since these things are now like possibilities for the future. Things that do not pass out of our lives, he says, such as memories, end up killing us. When he and his mother pull up in front of her decaying house, she begins recalling a trip they took together to Vienna and all they did and saw there. Although no such trip ever took place, Jamie plays along without hesitation, happy that "her own past has been replaced by the most pleasant memories of other people's lives." When she disappears into her house, he says that his story has been a retelling of his entire life, everything he can remember, and that we are what we do not know, and what we do know makes us sad, like the small missed chances in our lives.