A Three Dog Life (13 page)

When we stay at the Northeast Center, we hang out in the room. He sits in the chair with his part of the paper, and I sit on his bed with mine. When I glance over, his head is bowed, the paper on his lap. There are a couple of pictures of flowers on the wall, some photos of Sally and the baby, there is a green-checked quilt on the bed. Two bird calendars hang off tacks, one showing March, the other May. There is a corn plant, a spider plant; Sally bought him beautiful deep blue hydrangeas. But if Rich falls asleep, all I see is what my husband looks like alone.

The first decent day I could, I brought Rich back to the house. It had rained and flooded and rained again, and the ice was finally almost gone, replaced by mud. Rich was silent on the drive, not remarking on the usual landmarks, nor did he appear to recognize the house. It felt like ages to me since he'd been here, but I don't know how it felt to Rich. I don't know how he absorbs time. I like it better when I bring him home. We have a busy routine—cups of tea, lunch, more tea, cookies, doing dishes. In good weather, we'll take a walk, or sit outside. If Rich needs his nails clipped, Sally does it. If he needs a haircut, Sally does it. She is careful and patient. Last week he needed a haircut. Yes, he wanted one, but not now. Rich was stubborn before the accident, he is ten times more stubborn since. All the "it will only take a minute"s were to no avail. He wouldn't budge. "Not now," he said for the third time, an edge in his voice. We all stood ankle deep in that long moment, and then he sat down in the chair, Sally put the towel around his shoulders and went to work.

Five minutes into the haircut, Rich dozed off. Nora was carefully eating Cheerios, the dogs were behaving themselves for a change. Sally combed and cut, combed and cut. Rich looked peaceful. There is a volunteer barber at the Northeast Center, but Rich walks past without stopping. He is always walking, the nurses tell me; when he is poorly, he holds the railing along the walls of the corridors. Last week I found him in the corridor nearing the elevators. He told me he was looking for "the door to," "the place where," and then he gave up, unable to finish.

After the haircut, Rich wanted to go upstairs. The stairs worry me and I've always talked him out of the second floor. Most of the time he doesn't even notice that there are stairs. Suppose he lost his balance and I lost mine? I don't have strength enough to keep him safe, I can't even lift his old typewriter anymore. "But why do you want to do that?" I asked him. "There's nothing interesting upstairs." By then I'd steered him into the living room and we were sitting together on the sofa. The fire was lit, the dogs were snoring away.

"I should put my combs and brushes in their new places," he said happily.

When I was young, the future was where all the good stuff was kept, the party clothes, the pretty china, the family silver, the grown-up jobs. The future was a land of its own, and we couldn't wait to get there. Not that youth wasn't great, but it came with disadvantages; I remember the feeling I was missing something really good that was going on somewhere else, somewhere I wasn't. I remember feeling life passing me by. I remember impatience. I don't feel that way now. If something interesting is going on somewhere else, good, thank god, I hope nobody calls me. Sometimes it's all I can do to brush my teeth, toothpaste is just too stimulating.

The future was also the place where the bad stuff waited in ambush. My children were embarking on their futures in fragile vessels, and I trembled. I wanted to remove obstacles, smooth their way, I wanted to change their childhoods. I needed to be right all the time, I wanted them to listen to me, learn from my mistakes, and save themselves a lot of grief. Well, now I know I can control my tongue, my temper, and my appetites, but that's it. I have no effect on weather, traffic, or luck. I can't make good things happen. I can't keep anybody safe. I can't influence the future and I can't fix up the past.

What a relief.

I was on a small island once, in the middle of a great big lake, mountains all over the place, and as I watched the floating dock the wind kicked up, the waves rose from nowhere, and I imagined myself lying there and the dock suddenly breaking loose, carried away by the storm. I wondered if I could lie still and enjoy the sensation of rocking, after all I wouldn't be dead yet, I wouldn't be drowning, just carried off somewhere that wasn't part of my plan. The very thought of it gave me the shivers. Still, how great to be enjoying the ride, however uncertain the outcome. I'd like that. It's what we're all doing anyway, we just don't know it.

I'm sitting in the essay aisle of Barnes & Noble trying to change my socks. I don't have an apartment anymore so this is my pit stop, Broadway and 83rd. On one side of me is Vivian Gornick's
Approaching Eye Level
and on the other the complete essays of Montaigne. I'm planning to take a look at both, but first things first. I bought new shoes on my way to the city and wore them out of the store and the shoes are green with pink dots and my socks don't match. Normally this wouldn't bother me but it offends the eyes to look at my feet. A young couple appears and settles down at the tail end of fiction, four feet away. They are making a sound that if they were older would be called chuckling and he wants her to buy a book called Sex Something-Something but she doesn't want that one. He won't let go of her or stop doing to her whatever it is he's doing until she agrees to buy the book with sex in the title, but she continues to resist.

If I weren't busy, I'd be eavesdropping properly, but instead I'm struggling to remove the black sock with red peppers from my left foot. I had hoped for privacy. It's hard to sit on the floor and change your socks without looking as though you're sitting on the floor changing your socks, especially when you're sixty-three. I finally manage to yank them both off and slip on the new pink anklets, then slide back into my shoes. My feet are a vision of loveliness. The young couple is whispering, perhaps discussing the likelihood of my being nuts, but I don't glance in their direction. I open the Montaigne at random. "Of Drunkenesse," ah yes. You can do most anything in this friendly Barnes & Noble, as this is the branch where somebody sat undisturbed in a chair all day and all night and then at closing it turned out he was dead.

Hours later I'm sitting on a bench in front of the bagel store on Sixth Avenue and 13th eating an everything bagel with cream cheese and trying not to spill any of it on my student's story when a gentleman with reddish gray stubble on his face sits down next to me. This is a small bench. He smells of unwashed hair, old sweat, and he is talking. At first I think he has a cell phone because he speaks and pauses, speaks again, asking someone if he'd like to come home. I check quickly, no cell phone. He asks again, politely giving himself time to think about his answer. From the corner of my eye I see him pull a pack of cigarettes out of his breast pocket and then he searches for a light in the pocket of his jacket, which is right next to the pocket of my jacket. "Some other time," he is saying. I am still carefully eating my bagel but the everythings are falling on the title page. Finally he stands up to retrieve the matches, lights his cigarette, and sits down. Two drags later he gets up again. "Well," he says to himself, "see you tomorrow," and then he takes off.

Bagel eaten, I rummage through my bag, which is stuffed to overflowing with twenty or thirty single-spaced typed pages held together with a bobby pin and many creased, soiled manila envelopes, a camisole (I can explain everything), a pair of dirty socks, three lipsticks, one mascara wand, a paper bag stuffed with tissue paper, napkins, two empty plastic bags, one poetry anthology (paid for), three diaries full of scribblings and shopping lists, various other pieces of balled-up paper, a pen from a Realtor in a different state and another from a hotel in South Carolina, and some cutlery just in case. I have a friend who always carries a copy of the United States Constitution in her bag in case she gets a chance to read it someday. It isn't lost on me that to the casual observer I might appear for the second time today to be a person whose eye it is advisable to avoid, but I want to see if there are poppy seeds stuck in my teeth and I'm looking for my mirror. Pawing through this rubbish I'm about one plastic spoon shy of starting to shriek or mutter, but here comes my student. Well, I just won't smile at him, that's all. Thank god I changed my socks.

After class, at ten forty-five I take the subway to 111th where I parked under a construction scaffold this morning thinking
que sera sera,
and after I buy my big black coffee I am happy to find the car unscathed. This is my old neighborhood. One block from here, a painting that used to hang in my apartment went for sale on a card table in front of Academy Hardware. I know because the painter herself found it on the street and bought it back and then she called me up. I had not meant to throw it out, I told her, but in truth, I had.

I threw out everything when I moved. Thirty years of diaries. I even tossed the one that began "Today I married my darling" (but not before sitting down on the floor to read it through). It was terribly personal and terribly boring, not even useful as CliffsNotes. How liberating! The minute I threw it into the trash I remembered how the judge had been late, and the party in full swing, and I'd been afraid he wasn't coming, that he'd forgotten, or lost the address, or the phone number, that he was sick or stuck, that he was going to be a no-show. Rich put his arms around me. "Never mind," he said, "we'll go on our honeymoon and get married when we come back." Was I comforted? I must have thought that's sweet but where's the judge. Now I think, oh my god, what a nice man I married.

I drive back to Woodstock drinking coffee and blasting Leon Russell and I get home at twelve thirty to three excited dogs—there is a varmint in the yard and they'd like to get busy. Forget about it, I say, this is bear season. I breathe the night, go to bed with the rest of my pack, and wake up in the morning with a sawed-off past and a future I can't imagine.

In the morning I decide to go through the rubbish in my bag. I gave up the keys to my old apartment, but there are still four keys left on my key ring; I have no idea what they used to unlock. I ought to throw them out too, but I'm going to hang on to them. One of them might have opened my parents' house, which was sold years ago. My sister has dreams that our parents appear at her door, asking why they can't go home. "What do you tell them?" I ask, horrified.

"I skirt the issue," she says, and we both laugh. "But there was this one dream, I think they were younger. They were in the driveway and so was I. They wanted to go in the house and I told them they'd been gone a long time and somebody else lived there now."

"Then what?" I ask.

"I don't remember," my sister says.

"How did they look? What did they say?"

"It was a dream. I woke up."

"But—"

"It was a dream," my sister says again.

There was a very old magnolia in their yard, and I remember standing under it with my father one day when the thick petals were mostly on the ground, making a lush slippery carpet underfoot. "This is an example of nature's profligacy," my father said, rather proudly, as if he were responsible for such wild abandon. My memory has filed this together with something else he said another time—how nature wastes nothing, everything is used again and again, nothing vanishes, it only changes form. Did he say the next thing outright or did I make it up? Why go to all that trouble just to waste a soul?

One afternoon in March, in the middle of what Rich always called a "lie-down," I feel a hot coin in my chest, burning through my body to the bed. It goes away when I get up but then it happens again and next I think I'm feeling pains shooting down my left arm and finally I call the doctor, which is most unlike me, and she makes me come in even when I try to cancel. How are you feeling? she asks, and I tell her, well, I'm tired all the time and I sleep all the time and I can't stand to think and so I fill my life with sleep and movies and I have this burning hot coin in my chest and I can't breathe properly. Describe your day, she says, and I do, which doesn't take long. I tell her I stopped smoking to cheer her up. Well, that's good, she says, why did you do that? I tell her my husband was in the hospital and somehow I decided to quit. How is your husband? she asks. "It's been almost five years," I say, and I start to cry and can't stop. Five years sounds so permanent.

I arrive at the Northeast Center. Rich looks good. "How are you?" I yell into Rich's ear. He smiles at me. In twenty-nine days it will be five years.

"Either I feel weak and can't find something or I feel good, inexplicably good." I love it when he talks, when he answers with more than just a word or two.

" That's great," I say, "how did you sleep?" I no longer feel silly shouting such simple questions. They are easy to hear, easy to answer.

"I don't have any trouble sleeping," says Rich. "I just replay everything."

" What do you replay?" This is curious, something new.

" The accident," he says, "with none of the ghastly details."

" What do you remember?" I'm shocked.

"I don't remember being out with the dog."

I don't remember Rich ever talking about the accident.

" What made you think of it?" I'm careful to shout and enunciate at the same time.

"Lying here." Lying here alone, I think.

" Tell me more," I say, feeling my heart pound.

"I wish I could. I wish there were more to tell."

" What else do you remember?" To keep this conversation alive, I can't allow silence.

"I don't remember anything from before. Just that I'm trying to piece together the past, the very recent past."

" What pieces do you have?" He looks calm. I don't feel calm at all.

"Just the aftermath. I don't remember anything about the dog, about running after the dog, the whole thing escapes me."

"But you're remembering it now."

"I've been remembering that aspect ever since I can remember."