The Dogs of Littlefield (11 page)

“Nicholas is getting a reward for earning five beads for his bead jar today,” said Emily.

Nicholas received one bead for each calm or polite act he performed. Ten beads equaled an ice cream cone or a candy bar. Beads could also be lost. She smiled down at her little boy and took his hand.

“But you're not going to lose any today, right, buddy?” Nicholas gave her a panicky look from under his hat.

Emily listed Nicholas's latest achievements: that morning he had put on his coat without crying, climbed into his car seat without being asked, allowed Emily to leave him at the door of his classroom without grabbing her skirt and crying, and eaten his snack even though it was not macaroni and cheese.

George congratulated Nicholas, feeling sorry for him, his difficulties exposed so starkly in front of a stranger. Why did women believe that other people would find the minutiae of their children's lives interesting? He found his own sons interesting, but they were in high school, and actually were interesting, if only because of the depravity and risks involved in being in high school, and when they were younger he had been conscientious about not talking about them too much. Having children was a privilege, as Tina used to say, and like most privileges should be enjoyed quietly and mostly at home. He pictured Tina in her nubbly pink flannel nightgown, wearing her glasses at the breakfast table, the boys beside her in matching pajamas patterned with trains, their thick hair sticky from sleep, sharing a plate of brown-edged apple slices.

He realized Emily had asked a question. “I'm sorry?”

“How's the new book?”

“Oh, coming along.”

Meaning: how could you not realize that it's a disaster, a dull joke?

Emily gave him another understanding smile. “I hear you're going to visit our book club in March. I'm really looking forward to it.”

He grimaced in a way that he hoped looked self-deprecating. They walked on for a few more paces and then Nicholas stopped in front of the Dairy Barn, a storefront painted black and white, designed to look like cowhide.

“Well, here we are,” said Emily. “You've probably got a million things to do—but, if you don't, would you like to join us?”

From past mornings at the park with Feldman, George had perceived that Emily was not on steady ground with the other Ladies, as he used to call them. Maybe it was because she was a little younger than the rest of them, or because she was always talking about gulags and peasant uprisings, but he got the sense that she was tolerated rather than embraced. And Boris was considered the most obstreperous dog in the park, barking and splashing into the creek, trying to hump other people's dogs, digging holes under the chicken-wire fence of the community gardens and chewing holes in their hoses.

That dog,
people always said when referring to Boris.

George felt a gust of sympathy. “Okay,” he said.

Boris had begun barking at a bug-eyed Pomeranian sitting inside a parked Subaru. Emily tried to subdue him by grabbing his muzzle and holding it shut. “Hush,” she said, then tied Boris's leash to a parking meter on the sidewalk outside the Dairy Barn while the Pomeranian scrabbled at the car window with its tiny paws and Nicholas looked on seriously from under his fireman's hat.

Piano music began to emanate from within Emily's black leather bag, reminding George again of Margaret. He asked her what it was.

“Rachmaninoff.” Emily had opened her bag and was dredging up pens, books, tea bags, lipstick, tissues. “Piano Concerto Number Two. It always makes me think of the years just before the Revolution. The unrest. Can't you hear it?”

Drawn, probably, by the mention of “number two,” Nicholas turned to look at his mother in the doorway of the Dairy Barn. But instead of smirking, as George had expected, Nicholas frowned. He was a small child, smaller than most six-year-olds, and yet there was something about his thin bluish face that was almost elderly.

Rachmaninoff continued to play, but she closed her bag. She had promised Nicholas not to answer her phone, she confided to George, unless for an emergency.

“Isn't that right, Nicky?”

Still her phone continued to ring as two teenage Asian girls wearing long sweaters, tight jeans, and tall brown sheepskin boots walked around them and opened the door to the ice cream parlor. The smell of sugar surged into the cold air. Nicholas's chin trembled. His fingers twitched.

“See all the people who are
ahead
of us!” he cried out suddenly in real anguish. “Mommy! There won't be any
ice cream
left!”

“Don't whine, Nicky.”

“But you're going to answer your
phone
. You're going to answer it
first
.”

“No, I'm not.” Emily gave George an apologetic look, then put a hand on Nicholas's back, opened the door, and propelled him into the store. George followed, reluctantly. The door closed with a firm click. From outside on the sidewalk, Boris started barking.

They joined a line of seven or eight people at the counter, including a black woman George recognized from the town hall hearing a few weeks ago; she was wearing a white rabbit-fur turban and a full-length white down parka that made her look like a snowman. She turned to smile at Nicholas, who stared back at her tearfully.

Emily's cell phone had mercifully gone silent. The call might have been from her husband, Jonathan, she told George. Jonathan was in New York, presenting a paper at a three-day economics conference. Accompanied by one of his graduate students. Willa Clamage.

“Rhymes with
fromage
.” Emily made a grim face.

Outside, Boris was still barking. “Whose poor doggie is this?” a woman's voice could be heard saying. “All tied up alone on the street!”

Emily made another face but did not turn around to look through the plate-glass window at Boris and whoever was fussing over him.

Willa Clamage, she went on to explain, lowering her voice, was the sort of young woman who wore ballet flats and short, filmy dresses, even in November. Otherwise she was very smart.

“Most prized of all virtues in a graduate student,” Emily said moodily, resting her hand on Nicholas's shoulder. “Second only to being impressed with your faculty adviser.

“I don't know why I'm telling you this,” she added.

It was clear to George that she was trying to distract his attention from Nicholas, who was clutching at her black coat, his face twisting under his fireman's hat. But remembering Tina's accusation that he didn't listen to people so much as wait for his turn to say something, George decided to stay silent. He smiled sympathetically and, to his surprise, Emily went on with her story.

Three weeks ago, Jonathan had invited Willa Clamage to dinner. She'd arrived at the front door in a black slip of a dress. No coat. “Oh, hi,” she'd said, as if surprised to find Emily in the doorway, and handed her a chilly, narrow palm to shake.

“Welcome, friend,” Emily heard herself say. This was not a greeting she had ever offered to anyone else in her life. It made her sound Quaker. What had possessed her? Again she made a wry face, and George laughed. Emily's tale began to unreel before him. Willa Clamage in her black dress, white, severe, birdlike collarbones on display, facing off against pink-nosed, bespectacled Emily in an apron, wiping her hands on a dishrag.

Willa had not offered to help Emily in the kitchen, which Emily would never have allowed her to do—“Still, it's nice to be asked.” Once dinner was served, Willa hardly acknowledged the meal, an intricate Provençal beef stew, served with homemade bread, followed by a pear tart. She had brought a bottle of Chianti, which though reasonably good was not what Emily would have chosen to serve with her stew. Chianti was a thin wine. A full-bodied malbec would have been better. As he pictured Emily drinking Willa's thin Chianti, George heard Willa's low, nasal voice asking Jonathan complicated questions about the GDP that Emily could not follow. Whenever Jonathan spoke, Willa looked into his eyes, occasionally arching her back and lifting her slender white arms to bunch her black hair between her hands.

As soon as they had finished eating, Emily got up and bustled around the table, stacking bowls and gathering plates, briskly telling Jonathan to sit down when he offered to help. Poor overburdened Emily. Stews and homemade bread must be rarities, events to be celebrated and not something simply expected of her. But instead of celebrating his wife, and loading the dishwasher, and then giving her a back rub while listening to her analysis of fluctuations in the Russian ruble before 1917, weak-chinned Jonathan had volunteered to drive the coatless (very smart) Willa home.

Willa Cla
mage,
rhymes with
damage
. The schmuck.

“It really was a cold night,” said Emily, pallid in the fluorescent light of the Dairy Barn, a chalkboard listing ice cream flavors hanging behind her head. Dark Cherry Delight. Double Chocolate Fantasy. Jonathan had returned home late, explaining that he and Willa had continued to discuss his paper on aggregate expenditure curves; the very paper, in fact, being presented at the conference in New York that Willa and Jonathan were both now attending.

Emily's eyes widened. “Why am I telling you all this?”

Once more her cell phone began to play Rachmaninoff.

The black woman with the turban and the Asian girls left with their ice cream cones and the line moved forward.

“Maybe,” said George softly, “you should answer it.”

But by the time she'd located her phone in the complicated depths of her enormous black leather bag the ringtone had stopped. She peered at the phone's little screen and then said she did not recognize the number.

Nicholas was gripping her arm. With a flourish, Emily dropped the phone back into her bag. “See.” She kissed the top of his head. “I'm not answering it.”

“What if it was something important?” he said, with a worried frown.

George saw that this must be one of Nicholas's more exasperating traits, his ability to fret over conflicting fears, a kind of ambidextrous anxiety that probably came on especially at night (“I want the closet door closed! But I want to see if something's in there!”) and could quickly spiral into hysteria.

“Sweetie.” Emily bent down to look into his face. “Don't.”

“What if it's an emergency?”

Outside on the sidewalk, Boris was barking again. Then he quit barking and began to howl. George offered to go out and check on him.

“I'm sure he's fine,” said Emily.

“But what if it's an
emergency
?” Nicholas was still fixated on the missed cell phone call.

Emily gave George another look of comic exasperation. “Then the emergency will have to call someone else.”

George watched this exchange with disappointment. “Performance parenting” was how Tina used to describe it. Seeking to charm listeners in public with one's patience and good humor, using one's child as a foil. Had George not been there, Emily would have told Nicholas to be quiet or no ice cream and that would have been the end of it.

A bead for treating her kid to ice cream, a bead lost for treating him like a stage prop. Life in a bead jar. No wonder old Jonathan was banging Willa Clamage.

“Who's next?” called the teenage boy behind the counter, a gangly kid with a shaved head and a silver nose ring, and what looked to be a miniature spear piercing one ear, a menacing ensemble somewhat offset by his cowhide-printed T-shirt, required of employees at the Dairy Barn. He reminded George of Aaron and Bradley, his own sons (still unpierced, thank God), who had scooped ice cream at the Dairy Barn for a month last summer. Where were they this minute? Probably stoned, riding in a car without seat belts. Who was he to judge another parent? Kissing married women, following young mothers into ice cream parlors, getting them to confide in him, like some kind of pervert.

Still, he had not once thought about what it would be like to sleep with Emily. (“That's all men think about,” another Tina complaint.) A bead for him.

Nicholas blinked up at his mother, taking her hand with a grateful shudder, and with something like composure the two of them moved toward the ice cream counter.

“Do you want anything, George?” Emily asked, but when he glanced at his watch he realized that he was now late to meet Margaret, that she must be watching the door at the Forge, perhaps already gathering her coat and bag, face averted, paying for the cup of coffee she'd drunk alone. And thus he had become the ass he was afraid of being, a self-fulfilling prophecy he seemed powerless to escape.

As George was making his excuses, a dark, bearded young man yanked open the glass door, calling out in a clipped Indian accent, “Does someone in here own a dog?”

“Yes,” said Emily.

“You had better come. Something is wrong with it.”

Outside, the streetlights had come on amid snow flurries. Boris was sprawled by the parking meter, still tethered by his leash, paws jerking, breathing rapidly in shallow, painful-sounding huffs as Emily crouched beside him, crooning his name.

Then she sat all the way down on the icy sidewalk in her big black coat and cradled his head in her lap, stroking his long tangled gray and white fur. A small crowd had gathered, several people asking at the same time what had happened.

It was a strangely beautiful sight. A woman sitting on the sidewalk in a monumental black coat, blond hair streaming about her shoulders, passing cars illuminating her hair with their headlights, gilding the rims of her glasses as she bent over the big dog lying limp across her lap. George put an arm around Nicholas's small shoulders to hold him back; he wasn't sure why, maybe in case Boris turned violent, in the grip of some mysterious seizure. He could feel Nicholas trembling under his arm, as if Nicholas, too, were in the grip of something mysterious.