I first accepted a story by Anna Schachner close to ten years ago, when I was fiction editor of a now-defunct print literary magazine out of Atlanta. I was impressed by Anna’s ability to distill a character within a situation by a simple gesture. Obviously, her powers haven’t just maintained but grown, as is obvious here in this story, about a young girl’s first boyfriend.

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Lion Tamer

By the beginning of high school, I had admired many boys from a distance, but it was Lloyd Taylor who allowed me close enough to begin to think about the different ways that I loved. I loved my cat with the tender heart of someone who had chosen her from a litter of eight squirming kittens whose new fur looked like worn-down tennis balls, and this made me feel needed, significant, improved. I loved my parents, mottled as I often was in translation between them, and this made me feel anxious, silly, precarious. With curiosity and gratitude, I loved my cousin Norma, who was off at college and wrote me letters about her new freedom, information she said I should “shake to my grave,” a coy reference to the fact that many of her adventures started on a crowded dance floor.

My father thought that I should accept a date when I was asked to have one, the role of all potential suitors quickly reduced to that of a waiter with a dessert cart. My mother thought that I should socialize regularly, emphatically, designating some boys to be “real” dates and others to be “practice” ones, preparation for any subsequent ones that might count.

“Can I change one into the other? Can a practice date become a real date or do they always have to start and end up the same?” I asked her, as we stood in the kitchen drying dishes. I was fourteen and had been on exactly zero dates.

“Well,” she answered, tucking her chin to her shoulder to think, “it’s always better to know beforehand which kind it is. That way you can manipulate the boy accordingly.”

It was difficult for me to understand this, since she was the main role model I had. My father was a hard man to manipulate, not because of stubbornness or politics but because of his absolute refusal to expect. He had few expectations about anyone but himself, which probably explained why he had married my mother in the first place.

“But if you have to manipulate them, then you don’t get to really know them,” I argued.

“There are ways to do both,” she said, smiling as if she were about to be proud.

When Lloyd Taylor came to my high school at the start of my freshman year, I thought that I had my perfect chance. He walked in late to math, took a seat near the door, and began counting silently, his eyes resting only briefly on each of our faces. He wore a suit, with a tie, and polished saddle shoes that tapped the floor when he walked. He was thin, chiseled the way women models usually are, and he had hair pulled back in a ponytail that did not even reach his shoulders. “Punytail,” many students called it, when they failed to understand him the way I did. He spoke four languages, but he sprinkled Spanish phrases into his sentences just to show off, fourth period theatrics minus Mrs. Hernandez’s saliva.

It took me four days to talk to him. I baked him chocolate pinwheels, twelve, but only carried two to school, wrapped neatly in several layers of tin foil. When I had ripped the sheets, through the tiny metal teeth of the box, I imagined that they were Lloyd’s teeth sinking into the white dusting of sugar I always saved for last.

He took the sweets, graciously, stroking me gently on the shoulder for thanks. I blushed. That night I put on several pairs of socks and walked around the house in a pair of my father’s shoes, wondering why they did not tap the way Lloyd’s did, or rather, wondering how Lloyd made his tap.

“What are you doing,” my mother asked, bumping into me in the hallway, her arms clutched around a stack of clean laundry.

“Nothing. Just testing these shoes.”

“You’re a girl, Frannie.”

“I wanted to hear the sound they made,” I explained.

“Oh, well that’s easy,” she said, “they plod.” She opened the door to the linen closet and began placing the towels on the shelves. The smell of Lifebuoy soap drifted into the hallway. I held my foot up and let one shoe drop to the floor.

“Lloyd’s dance,” I said, volunteering information my mother usually had to coax out of me. I had learned to initiate certain conversations with her the way that I did with teachers who might or might not bump up my grade to an A. “I mean, actually, they tap,” I corrected myself.

“Lloyd?” my mother said, her head appearing around the edge of the closet door. She had her black hair swept back in a hair band and her day makeup on, which made her look like an ill-prepared movie star.

“Lloyd is new at school. He’s half-British.” I lifted the other foot and let the shoe drop onto the first one, making a thump that sent the cat Layla running into the bathroom to the security of the shower curtain with smiley faces.

“Do we need to go shopping?” my mother asked, spreading a strand of hair over the top of my head. I shrugged and moved away, but the next day we spent four hours at the mall. We bought only sale items, at my mother’s insistence, but as my mother said, “We bought good.”

I wore blue cotton pants and a crisp blouse with a pointed collar to school the following Monday. Lloyd wore a thin tie he had bought at a thrift store in London. I watched his mouth as he talked, marveling at how little it had to move to produce the polished, rounded sounds that made him Lloyd. Shy, weird Lloyd, dismissed by most of the other students as an overseas eccentricity, a castaway who had drifted ambis ashore.

That very day, when we sat together outside on the top of a school picnic table, we talked about Lloyd’s favorite subject: animals. He knew the genetic difference between chimpanzees and humans. He speculated that dogs had the intelligence to detect certain diseases in humans and had several stories where this had actually occurred. He had ridden an elephant, in India, wearing silk pants that circled his ankles and made him feel special.

I explained to him that I merely loved animals, that I had no interest in DNA or diseases that mice shared with children. During my two years in the Girl Scouts, I could have earned a badge that sounded remarkably like “Hunters and Gatherers,” a term he used to connect people and animals in a way that I had never thought much about.

I told him about my cat whose skin became inflamed in the summer, bumpy like the outside of a homegrown cucumber. “It hurts me when she hurts like that,” I said. “That’s all I know.”

“Agony,” he said, softly. He kissed me on the cheek, where a thin layer of Rose Petal blush my mother had expertly applied that morning hopefully still showed.

The next afternoon there he stood, framed in our doorway. I had been in my room, reading about the mating rituals of lions when the doorbell rang.

“I have the solution,” he said, whisking a white, circular piece of cardboard from behind his back.

“Are you going to come in?” I asked, annoyed at myself for not having been able to control the visit, a defeat which would certainly earn my mother’s attention. Because I hadn’t had time to prepare, it felt like a practice date on the surface, but inside it might have been more.

“Layla,” he called as soon as his feet tapped the hallway. She came, running, a first for her, and rubbed respectfully against his creased trousers before lying flat across his shoes. Drawn to his feet, as I was.

I heard my mother open the back door and then click it shut behind her. I stood in the hallway wondering what to do next. Where would we go? What room of the house did not breathe the knowledge of my life: the tense, looming moments of my parents’ arguments, or the situated silence that drifted from room to room; the beauty sessions that resulted in nothing more than a better knowledge of the color palette? I looked around, pivoting my head slightly to keep Lloyd in view, and felt even my baby sister’s presence, though she had been hidden inside my mother the months that she was alive.

“I’ve devised a plan for Layla. You mustn’t laugh,” Lloyd said, running a finger along his jaw.

“Layla doesn’t need a plan.”

“Yes, she does. For her skin. Actually, to prevent her skin from worsening. Then perhaps she won’t remember that it was bothersome to begin with.” Lloyd held up the piece of cardboard, pinched between his thumb and forefinger. “Queen Elizabeth wore one of these each and every time she was seen in public during her reign. I should think it would suffice for Princess Layla here.”

He picked up Layla and looked around the living room, resting his eyes upon the couch. “There would be good,” he said, reminding me that I had not officially asked him to sit down.

We sat on the velvet couch with Layla between us. As Lloyd maneuvered the cardboard around her neck, I held her down. With claws that showed beneath her furry paws, she tore a hole in the velvet that demarcated the spot, for over fifteen years, where we enacted Lloyd’s plan. After that, for mornings and afternoons to come, whenever I sat there, I thought of Lloyd and the first glittering of romance so different than anything I had seen of my parents’.

Layla’s collar was beautiful. Lloyd had painted it with Renaissance motifs, in green, reds, and ochre. Layla obviously hated it, but she looked regal with her pink nose and rounded head perched stiffly above such elegance. Lloyd beamed. We held hands, the space between our bodies now absent of Layla. I felt my inhibitions begin to dissipate, and I knew that I would kiss Lloyd that very day, while Layla dreamt of being able to pivot her head once again to attend to her wounds.

My mother entered the living room just as Lloyd was beginning to edge closer to me, pretending to cover the one-inch hole Layla’s claws had left in the velvet. She came through the dining room, past the table and chairs my father had refinished himself, his fingernails a soft shade of brown for weeks afterwards.

She met my gaze first and her eyebrows arched to suggest her delight in Lloyd’s position on the couch. I felt my face flush, the definite red of a girl on a date that counted. “Company, Frannie?” she said, pausing to re-adjust a picture frame.

Lloyd jumped to his feet and extended his hand. My mother shook it whole-heartedly, as her basic assessment of character had always been the firmness of a handshake and the ability to eat unappetizing food for the sake of politeness.

“This is Lloyd, Mama. From school. He’s new this year.”

My mother smiled and welcomed him to our home, offering Coke and cake and a tiny glimpse into the mechanics of love. “Such a great dresser,” she said, stepping back to scan Lloyd’s stiffly starched shirt and tapestry vest. She glanced down at his shoes but said nothing.

“Thank you,” he said, beaming.

When Lloyd left that afternoon, I walked him to the front door, making sure to guide him along the hardwood floor. We stepped out into the yellowish-gray of the afternoon and looked up and down the street. Several fathers were just arriving home from work, and I knew my father would be sure to follow. I wanted him to meet Lloyd so that he would know boys liked me. I gazed down to the corner around which my father’s Buick turned every afternoon and sighed. Lloyd picked some couch stuffing off his trousers and ran his hands along the top of the porch railing. Suddenly, with the speed and whimsy of lightning, he pressed his lips to mine and then removed them. “Smashing,” he said, while I felt my insides glow like the coils of a stove burner.

Then Lloyd explained to me that as an aspiring academic, one who would study the world and make it better, he had to be careful about spreading his attention too far beyond the realm of his studies.

“I could be a subject,” I said, hopefully.

He beamed and shook his head. Just then, my father’s Buick turned the corner, slowing as it always did in anticipation of playing children.

At dinner that night, my mother announced to my father that I had my first real boyfriend. She did not use either of her two dating terms, so I assumed that “boyfriend” was one level beyond. I was victorious, only now I had to decide if I loved Lloyd more like I loved Layla, or if I loved Lloyd more like I loved my parents. I put a forkful of salad in my mouth and chewed, thinking how suddenly wonderful I felt to have this decision so crucial before me. My father cut his pork chop on a diagonal and asked me his name.

“Lloyd,” I said.

“Does he have a last name?”

“Lloyd Taylor.”

“Don’t know his father,” my father said, placing his knife horizontally across the back of his plate, as my mother always requested we do.

“I don’t think it will be serious,” I said, “but he’s nice.”

My mother excused herself from the table and went into the living room to turn on the lamps beside the couch, a ritual she did every night between the salad and entree. We heard her open the front door and then shut it. A few minutes later, she returned to the kitchen and stood at the head of the table opposite my father. I stuck my fingers through the holes of the plasticized lace tablecloth and felt the smooth surface of the table beneath. My father’s knife scraped his plate.

“Madelane?” my father said. He re-arranged his green beans into a tidy pile waiting for her to respond.

“Frannie,” my mother began, her voice low and steady as she moved back toward the living room. “I just saw something.”

At this, my father stopped eating and sat back, his arms atop the chair’s. “Madelane, what’s going on? Frannie?”

I shrugged my shoulders. I removed my fingers from the lace and inched my chair back from the table.

“Frannie,” my mother shouted from the hallway, “was Lloyd given permission to borrow the cat?”

“What?” I said.

“Come on!” my father said, slapping his napkin into the mashed potatoes.

The two of us shoved our chairs back and raced to the front door, where my mother stood with her hands on her hips, elbows nearly touching the wooden frame on either side. I pushed past her and saw two headlights beaming from a car parked two houses down, and in the middle of those yellow stripes of light was Lloyd, cradling Layla against her body so that her head was hidden under one arm, emphasizing only the white of her new cardboard collar.

“What are you doing, Lloyd?” I yelled.

“I’ll return her promptly,” he called, his accent somehow diminished by the darkness. “I’m going to bathe her in a special shampoo and rinse. It will soothe her skin.” He opened the car door and disappeared into the car only to pop out a second later, no Layla in view.

I jumped down the front steps and stood where the grass met the cement walkway. “I don’t want you to bathe her. She’s mine. I’ll bathe her.”

“No, no. I want to help.” With that, he got into the car and drove to our curb where he called out, “Be back in a flash.” Then he drove away as my father sighed and my mother removed one hand from one hip, Cupid’s misguided, bent arrow straightened again.

We returned to the table. My mother sat back and rested her elbows on the table, leaning toward me, a solemn gaze to her eyes. “When I was in the living room, I saw a car stop just up the street. I thought I recognized Lloyd driving, so I opened the front door.” She paused, looked at me harder, and continued. “I wasn’t spying.”

I stared at her. “She’s my cat.”

“I’m sorry,” she added.

“She’s my responsibility. I can’t mix responsibility with Lloyd. He’s Lloyd.”

“He’s trying to get to you through the cat.”

My father shook his head in disbelief. “Why would he steal her cat, Madelane?”

“He’s already got to me,” I said quietly. “He’ll bring her home.” I cocked my head as if waiting to hear a doorbell ring.

“I think you’ll have to call him,” my father said.

“A good idea,” my mother agreed.

I left the table without asking to be excused and walked to the phone in the den. I thought how the outside world’s weirdness, as close as it seemed now, could never match that which occurred in our house.

“You’ll need to give him time to get home,” my mother shouted from the kitchen.

I nodded in silent agreement. I sat on the couch, on the edge, and thought about Layla in Lloyd’s house, her head enthroned above the cardboard collar. If he didn’t return her, she would insist upon sleeping on his legs, as she did mine every night. She would leave hair all over his stylish clothing, multitudes of reminders of me. I thought about all of this and knew that Lloyd was indeed prone to drama, and no doubt this was just a ploy to get my attention. He was getting all the attention. But something else was going on inside me, and my mother just couldn’t see past the surface, the very same human weakness that had made Lloyd an outsider in the first place.

My mother came and sat down on the couch next to me. She smelled like Crisco layered over the gardenia bouquet always hovering around her. “I’ve got your father doing the dishes,” she said, meaning I was excused from that nightly chore.

“Thank you.”

She sighed. “I don’t know, Frannie. I guess you just didn’t have the control.”

I jerked my body to face her. “Control?”

“Lloyd. Lloyd, well, Lloyd is just showing you he has the upper hand.”

“I don’t think he would take my cat if he thought he had to do that. Lloyd doesn’t even think about that kind of thing, anyway. He thinks about species and biology and the future.” I stopped for breath. “He’s ridden an elephant.”

“Frannie, as a woman you need to assume the control.” She lowered her voice for the next part. “But don’t let them know it.”

I wondered if perhaps my mother didn’t overhear my conversation with Lloyd on the porch. I started to ask her, but then decided it wouldn’t change anything. I still blushed when I thought of Lloyd’s skin against mine, or the smell of pencil shavings that seemed to float upon his skin, but mostly I was worried about Layla. It felt odd, wrong even, to have those two emotions—love and worry—juxtaposed.

“I’m going to call Lloyd,” I said.

My mother stood up.

“No, stay,” I commanded.

I called information first. There were several new Taylor listings in Charlotte, the operator said.

“Is there one with a British-sounding first name?” I asked.

“Nathan Taylor? There’s a Nathan and a William.”

“Is Nathan a British name?” I asked my mother, my hand clamped over the mouthpiece.

She rolled her eyes and said, “Does it really matter?”

I thanked the operator and punched the numbers for the Nathan Taylor residence. I was mildly surprised when Lloyd answered.

“Lloyd, it’s Frannie. Do you have my cat?”

He cleared his throat, as he did every five minutes or so in math class, and said, “I do and I’ll return her shortly.”

“Please bring her now,” I said, casting my eyes toward my mother, who sat nodding in approval.

“It was supposed to be a surprise,” he said.

“Oh,” I said, mindful of his earnest tone and the way he could still roll his words into tight packages of possibility. “A surprise, you say.”

“I’ll be there in half an hour,” he said.

“Fine.”

The phone clicked. My mother looked glum. I placed the receiver back in the cradle. My father came to the doorway with a dishtowel over his shoulder and then turned back around.

We sat there on the couch in silence for a few seconds. “I think he likes me,” I finally said to my mother, who had begun pulling up the arm covers on all the den furniture, ignoring the fact that she had done this once already.

“Of course he likes you, but you just don’t take someone’s pet like that,” my mother said.

“He said he has a surprise for me.”

“I like his optimism.”

When the doorbell rang, my father met me in the hallway and stepped abruptly in front of me to move to the door. Lloyd spoke first. He held Layla. She still wore the collar, only now it was studded with two fake rhinestones and several hearts made of tin foil. “As I promised, Frannie,” he said, looking around my father’s body to meet my eyes. “Only there wasn’t time for the bath, so I embellished her collar instead.”

My father moved to block his gaze and held out his hands for Layla. “Please apologize to my daughter,” he said, words my mother’s tongue barricaded inside her mouth when she realized I wasn’t up for the challenge.

Lloyd lowered his head and handed over Layla. He gave the collar one last gentle adjustment and brushed a finger against Layla’s pink nose. “I’m not quite sure what for, Mr. Latham.”

“For stealing her cat, I should think.” I had never heard my father adopt a fake British accent, nor did I think he meant to. But like me, he was under Lloyd’s spell; pulled into the tight lines of his own mouth.

“Could I possibly speak to Frannie alone?”

My father looked at me for approval. I looked at Lloyd’s feet. “It’s fine,” I said.

“I’d like a word with you first,” my father said to Lloyd. “Frannie, if you’ll excuse us.”

“Okay,” I said. I backed into the living room and nearly stepped on Layla, who had stopped to scratch at her bejeweled collar. I picked her up and tried to put my cheek to hers. One of the tin foil hearts had SURPRISE spelled out in gold glitter. I scratched off a small patch with my fingernail and sprinkled the gold in my palm.

When my father called for me to return, my mother appeared and ruffled my hair. “Glitter?” My father joined us.

“What did he say?” I asked.

He wiggled his mouth from side to side, the surest indicator that he was uncomfortable. “He said you were the best girl at the school and he was just borrowing Layla to give you a surprise.”

I smiled victoriously.

My father looked embarrassed and added, “I think he’s short-lived.” He swept his eyes around the room. “Perhaps his judgment isn’t that clear but his intentions seemed to be sincere.”

The antique clock in the living room chimed eight o’clock. Layla scampered into the kitchen looking for dinner, an unwilling vagabond at peace with the world again. My mother ruffled my glittered fingers and said, “Next time you’ll be prepared.” She walked past my father.

Lloyd still stood on the porch. I motioned him in, but he said, “I’d rather not, just now.”

I closed the front door and joined him. “You could have just taken the collar if you wanted to surprise me with it.”

“Yes, I see that now.” He stretched his neck several times and thumped a palm against the porch railing. “It was wrong of me, but I wanted to do something amazing, something to capture your attention and make you remember me. Layla seemed appropriate. I was always going to bring her directly back and I never thought anyone would even see that I had borrowed her.”

I nodded, but it was my heart that moved the most, swelling in my chest like my best souffle. “I do love that cat,” I said.

“You see, I’m leaving, Frannie. My parents are sending me to boarding school to work on some things. I just wanted you to remember me.”

“You just came here. Why would you leave so soon?”

“We’ve had an adventure, haven’t we?”

“I suppose,” I said.

Lloyd only came to school for about two weeks after that night he stood on my porch, his British-ness suddenly exacerbated. We met behind the school dumpsters everyday. Once Lloyd brought a vile of gold glitter, some of which he sprinkled on my hair so that I had to later explain it to my parents as an accident in art class.

“All that glitters is not gold,” my mother said, looking sideways at my father, some understanding, finally, between them.

It turns out that Lloyd’s stay at school had always been planned as temporary, a final test of his inclinations, although he kept this to himself as he had kept his plan for Layla to himself. As soon as they found one, Lloyd’s parents transferred him to a private school in New York, a place where he could receive the motivation and encouragement someone like him needed. A place where the all-boy student body eddied and swirled around him and any control must have dissipated, just like the tapping sound in my head.

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