Yes, the old methods may exist these days only at places such as Schwendeman's Taxidermy Studio (where Mum-Mum's beeswax is in fresh supply and antique salimeters measure the salt content in Pup-Pup's secret recipe for pickle), but here, at the WTC, where judges inspect anatomy with an obsessiveness that verges on oblivion (as one photographer aptly put it), beeswax paws and lips would be embarrassingly arcane.
Rhymer hadn't finished his lobster in time for the competition, so he coached me on how to modernize the antique squirrel in twelve hours. "You can sculpt out these lips, and since they're wax, you can heat them up on this light bulb," he said, pointing to the lamp on the nightstand that separated my bed from Mayer's. "You can take a toothbrush and fluff it up. Buy a sculpting tool at the trade show—a deer-lip tucking tool will cost around five to fifteen dollars. Then dig out the lips. Go to Jo-Ann Fabrics and buy dark umber craft paint. Scrape and rebuild the paw pads with epoxy."
No other competitor had a third-generation Smithsonian taxidermist in his or her hotel room acting as coach. I was exceptionally lucky, if deflated.
I defended my squirrel, though. Had I been drowned by an old, unsentimental taxidermist, I can't say I'd look this good. Its imperfections gave it character: its rust-stained bib and brown incisors showed that it had cracked its own nuts (a pampered zoo captive it was not); its thin whiskers evoked Clark Gable's elegant mustache; even the wax anatomy was noble in this sea of store-bought plastic. Okay, so you couldn't look up its nostrils to see its brain (its nostrils were stuffed with papier-mâché paste—the mark of a beginner), yet I'd made everything—except for the glass eyes and, of course, the "derm"—by hand. My squirrel had personality; it was humble and wiry, a fighter who'd survived in the shadow of the NewJersey Turnpike. It had, if just barely, the vital spark of life.
No matter. Rhymer would not buy my excuses. Taxidermy, like basic mathematics, is empirical; you can't compete with a fantasy creature. Again and again, the taxidermists I'd met had told me: taxidermists are restricted to duplicate what nature has already created. (If only Rhymer had accompanied Charles Darwin on the voyage of the HMS Beagle, I thought, the world would not still be arguing about natural selection.)
Rhymer shook his head, his mind clicking. He grabbed a notebook by the phone and sketched squirrel feet so that I'd have reference when I rebuilt the paw pads. His eyes followed the long seam that ran ventrally from the squirrel's sternum to its anus, as if the crude stitches were primitive surgery. "You can minimize the seams by fifty percent by pulling out the hairs from under the thread with a sewing needle. Then take a toothbrush or a wire brush and back-brush it to make the fur look softer," he said, quickly adding, "Even city squirrels are fluffy."
Then he turned toward Mayer, who was in a DO NOT DISTURB zone, feverishly working, and said, "Look at how fluffy her rats are. Squirrels are glorified rats with fluffy tails!"
As he was leaving, he said, "The angle on your back leg is harsh. Wrinkled skin needs to be tucked in, and make the wax feet less lumpy." The door clicked shut. Mayer looked up and snorted, "It looks like a football!"
In the morning, Mayer tossed me tweezers and said, "They'll work better for extracting the soft fine hairs out of the seam—which is dry and brittle." I refluffed the squirrel and set it in its display case. The judging started at five P.M.; I had only a few hours to preen. "Boy, is it warm, but I dare not open the window because of dust," Mayer said, breaking an intense stretch of silence. She looked like a mime. She wore white muslin gloves so she wouldn't smudge her Plexiglas display case. She held it up to the window, her huge brown eyes scanning for fingerprints. That night the case would enshrine one of her three competition pieces, The Dogs Bollocks.
Mayer considers a title change. The Americans might not understand; they might find it distasteful. You see, in England, the expression "the dog's bollocks" is slang for "the best ever" (whereas "absolute bollocks" means "absolute rubbish"). For Mayer, however, it also literally means canine testicles. The testicles in question once belonged to a neighbor's terrier named Gus. Gus overstepped his bounds one day, as dogs tend to do, and Mayer noticed. It was a bad day for Gus. "He raped my bitches, so I had him castrated," she said coolly. Now Gus's testes floated in a small vial of vodka. A rat so alert it was terrifying mischievously rolled the testes down a laboratory shelf, dismantling a scientist's experiment. Mayer, who loves and identifies with rats and finds them intelligent, had captured more than just rat anatomy; she had captured the very spirit of the species—its playfully defiant soul. Mayer's lab rat sought revenge! When she'd first showed me the piece in Norfolk, she'd called it a Damien Hirst knockoff and said that she'd apologized to him for it at a party. Hirst had said, "That's not a knockoff; that's a compliment!"
I carried Gray Squirrel, Yellow Dawn down in the elevator and through the grooming area. Had it been 1880 and this was the first Society of American Taxidermists competition, the squirrel would have been displayed among creatures lovingly preserved by pioneers who innovated a distinctly American style of taxidermy. Today their descendants were converging in a hotel ballroom. I stepped inside, holding my squirrel. The officials manning the doors read the label and exclaimed, "That girl's from Brooklyn!" One
