The Elephants

by Tatiana Duvanova

            Two weeks before Christmas, Elaine brought home a large pink porcelain elephant from one of her shopping sprees. It was 90% off. A steal really. But they had no use for it.
            Barry stared at the elephant in the living room.  It was huge, at least a third of Elaine’s size. “Is that porcelain?” he asked.
            “It is,” said Elaine. “See the circles on the sides? ‘Parcel-gilt.’ That’s what the salesperson said. ‘Partially gilded.’ ”
            “Oh, wow,” said Barry. That was a lot of porcelain. And coated with gold too. 
Elaine sat down on one of their three sofas and sighed. “We don’t have any use for it… But the discount… I mean if you think about its real value…”
“Did you say it was 90% off?”
“Yes. I did the math. We saved nearly four thousand.”
Barry thought about it. He and Elaine weren’t in want of money, but it hadn’t always been this way.  He’d had to work hard his whole life. Four thousand dollars was not an amount of money he could disregard.
Elaine signed. “I can take it back, I guess,” she said, fumbling with the tag on the elephant’s neck.
“No,” said Barry. “Let’s keep it for now. We can make it work.”

            They had trouble finding a place for the elephant. For the first time their house seemed too small. The elephant was too big for any of their stands, too precious to be left on the floor where Barry, who was becoming clumsier every year, could bump into it. For now they kept it in the corner of the living room on a Persian rug Elaine had bought some years ago, and Barry walked carefully around it, but that could only last for a while. 
            A couple of days before Christmas, their daughter, Clair, called to cancel her previously planned visit. She had to work right after Christmas, and one of her children had caught a cold. It no longer made sense to come.
            “Oh, okay sweetheart,” said Elaine into the phone entering the living room, sitting next to Barry so that he could hear the conversation. She glanced at the pile of gifts she had carefully arranged under the Christmas tree two weeks before. “I’ll mail the gifts then. How are we? Well, we’re fine. What’s new? Well nothing’s new really. Oh, I bought this porcelain elephant. Ninety percent off. I don’t know where to put it though. But we’ll figure something out.” She stared at the elephant in the corner. 
            After the call, Elaine rushed to the post office, anxious to mail the gifts. Barry stayed on the sofa in front of the TV. When Elaine came back she was accompanied by two young men and a large cardboard box. Her eyes were shining. 
            “I stopped by a furniture store. You won’t believe what I found! And they agreed to deliver right away.” Elaine had bought a stand, a huge one, much larger than any of the ones they already had, large enough for their elephant. After the men assembled the stand, Elaine pointed to its sides. They were decorated with pink polka dots. “I hope they’re the right shade.”
            They brought the elephant, and yes, almost the exact same shade of pink. Elaine clapped her hands and jumped up. Barry’s chest filled with warmth. “We found a way to make it work,” he said. 
            Everything was fine until a month after Christmas when Clair’s gifts arrived. One of them was a porcelain elephant, a tiny green one. When Elaine unwrapped the gift and held out the elephant in her hand, Barry stared at it with horror. “I guess we can put it next to our elephant,”  he said, and Elaine nodded, but they both knew it wasn’t going to work. 
            “It looks horrible,” said Elaine after they had placed it on the stand next to the pink elephant, and Barry was grateful he didn’t have to say it first.
            “It does. Why did she do this to us? Everything was perfect.”
            “She must have remembered I said something about the elephant.” Elaine sighed. “At least she was listening.” 
            Barry stared at the elephants. “We can send it back to her, I guess?” 
           “No,” said Elaine. “She’s our only child. We cannot do this to her. We’ll find a way to make it work.”
            For a couple of days they kept the green elephant next to the pink one, but the two of them looked hideous together. One was too small, the other one too big, and pink could never work with green. 
            “Let’s separate them,” suggested Barry. They tried. First, they put them in different corners, then in different rooms, then on different floors. But it could never work. One house couldn’t contain two elephants, especially if their colors didn’t coordinate. In the end they put them next to each other in the living room, pretending it didn’t hurt their eyes. 
            Their place looked gloomier and gloomier each day, the mismatched elephants weighing them down.

            In February, when Barry was shopping for Elaine’s birthday present, having spent hours in a department store feeling like anything they had he had already given her at least once, he saw it. A pink porcelain elephant, medium sized with green hooves.
            When Barry realized what it meant, he nearly shouted out of happiness. He was just about to grab the elephant and go to the register, when a young woman picked it up from the shelf. 
            “This will look nice in our living room,” said the woman, showing the elephant to her male companion. “What do you think?”
            The companion nodded. “Yeah, that wouldn’t look too bad.”
            Blood rose to Barry’s face. With every fibre of his being he tried to will the woman to put the elephant down and walk away, but her manicured fingers clutched the figurine. 
            “We could buy it,” she said. “Or we could buy something else.”
            Barry cleared his throat. “Excuse me, Miss, but I was going to buy this elephant. I’d already set it aside.”
            The woman turned and narrowed her eyes. “I’m sorry?”
            “That elephant you’re holding. That’s my elephant.”
            “Your elephant? It has a tag on it. How is this your elephant?”
            “I was going to buy it.”
            “Well, now I’m going to buy it.”
            “No you can’t. I saw it first.”
            “I grabbed it first. That’s what counts,” said the woman, taking her companion’s hand. “Let’s go to the register,” she said to him, and they started walking at a brisk pace.
            Barry ran after them, but they were too fast. 
            “I’ll take it,” the woman said to the cashier when they made it to the register.
            “Wait no, Ma’am,” said Barry addressing the cashier. “I was going to buy it. That’s my elephant.”
            “Well, I’m sorry, Sir, but it looks like she’s holding it,” said the cashier.
            “I was going to take it. She grabbed it right from under my nose.”
            “I don’t know what he’s talking about. I just took it from the shelf,” said the woman. 
            “Well, I was just about to take it,” said Barry.
            “Oh, God,” said the woman, rolling her eyes. “Is there another elephant for him?” She turned to the cashier. 
            “No, unfortunately not,” said the cashier. “It’s one of a kind.”
            “Of course it is.” The woman smiled at the elephant in her hand, then reluctantly let go of it, so that the cashier could scan the tag.
            Barry watched her. He wondered whether he should try to snatch the bag from the woman as she exited the store, but her boyfriend was eyeing him suspiciously, as if he knew what Barry was thinking. He was a big guy, much younger than Barry too.
            Then he heard the cashier’s voice. “You know what, let me check if we have any elephants at our other outlets.”
            Barry turned to her. “Yes, please.” He didn’t think it would work. 
            “Yes, I found one for you. Twenty one miles away,” said the cashier after a couple of minutes. 
            Barry let her words sink in slowly. He didn’t care how far it was.
            “You know what, we could just deliver it to you.”
            Barry couldn’t believe his ears. Would he get the elephant in the end?
            “So, Sir, would you like to make the purchase?”
            “Yes,” said Barry. “I would like to make the purchase very much.”

            The next week Barry couldn’t sleep. The first two nights he was overwhelmed by excitement, but on the third night, exhausted by the lack of sleep, not having received the elephant, he started to worry. What if they had written down the wrong address? What if the elephant had gotten lost in the mail? It had happened before, his packages never making it to him. And what if it was the wrong elephant? It all depended on the very exact shade of pink.
            Four days. Five days. Still no elephant. Sixth day. Seventh.
            Barry looked for the receipt. Was there a tracking number? A phone number he could call?
            To his horror, he couldn’t find the receipt. He had nothing to prove the elephant was ever his. 
            On the tenth day the package arrived. Elaine was out shopping, trying to escape the gloom of a house with the two mismatched elephants. Barry couldn’t believe his eyes. Yes, that was it, exactly the right size, exactly the right shades of green and pink. Elated, he went to the living room and placed it between the two elephants. The third elephant changed the situation completely. Everything was just right.
            The only thing Barry wasn’t sure about was whether to show Elaine her gift now or to wait until her actual birthday. He went back and forth, taking the elephant upstairs, hiding it in the attic, then bringing it back down and putting it on the stand. On one of his trips up, he stumbled and nearly fell. Thinking what could have happened to the elephant, he realized he had to decide now. He heard Elaine’s car pull up in the driveway.
            He rushed to the living room, placed the elephant on the stand, then went to the door to greet Elaine. He was shaking as he opened the door for her.
            “Elaine, dear. I have something to show you.”
            He took her hand and led her into the living room. When she realized where he was taking her, she glanced at him apprehensively, but Barry persisted. Elaine didn’t look at the stand as they entered. 
            “Elaine, dear. Look.” He pointed at the stand.
            Elaine refused to turn her head, and instead gave him an intense stare. 
            “Elaine, please trust me,” Barry said. “Just look over there.”
            Elaine sighed and turned her head. “Oh, my God, Barry!”
            “I know, Elaine, I know.”
            Elaine was on the verge of tears. “Where did you find it? How?”
            “A long story. I’ll tell you later. Do you like it? It’s your birthday present.”
            “Do I like it? I love it.” She squeezed his hand. “Look what I found, by the way.” She bent over to find something in the pile of plastic bags she had brought with her from her latest shopping spree. “Oh, there it is.” She pulled out a white plastic bottle. “Look, ‘porcelain figurine cleaner.’ Imagine all those months I just used a duster on them.” She looked at the elephants. “I hope I didn’t damage them. But now everything is right. We have the elephants and the proper cleaner. Everything is good, Barry.”
            And everything was good for several months until the porcelain figurine cleaner ran out, and Elaine went out to buy some more. When she came back home with two bottles in her hands, her face was white and bloodless. 
            “What happened?” asked Barry.
            “Those are the two last bottles.”
            “No problem, dear. They’ll last us for a while. By the time we will need more they’ll restock them.”
            “No, you don’t understand. They discontinued the product.”
            “What?” said Barry. “But what are we supposed to use to clean the elephants?”
            “I don’t know, Barry, I really don’t.” Elaine broke into tears. 
            Barry eyed her helplessly. “You know what. I’ll drive around the stores and see if some of them have more bottles left. And you can check Amazon, if you feel better. Don’t worry, we’ll figure something out.”
            When Barry came home, Elaine was no longer crying but her eyes were still red. “I ordered three bottles. That was all they had left on Amazon.”
            “This is great news, Elaine. I bought two.”
            “Oh, Barry!” Elaine threw herself onto him and they hugged.
            Barry took the bottles to the kitchen, then came back, and he and Elaine stared at their elephants. Barry thought about the cleaning liquid bottles under the sink, wondered how long they were going to last. Then he looked at the opposite corner of the living room, suddenly struck by how empty it looked. There was not a single thing in that corner. That emptiness horrified him. He felt it spreading throughout the room, consuming them. 

Tatiana Duvanova (she/her) is a writer, a Fulbright alumna, and a PhD candidate. She was born and raised in Voronezh, Russia. She holds an MFA degree in creative writing from the University of New Mexico and is currently located in Narragansett, Rhode Island. You can find her writing in Litro, Southword, Notre Dame Review, Invisible City, Necessary Fiction, and elsewhere. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tatianaduvanovawriter/