The Dogs of Littlefield (28 page)

“All people do here is complain about problems,” he was saying. “They say they are scared about everything. But they do not realize what the real problem is. The problem is that everyone has problems. I have decided I do not want to be a lawyer and spend all my days solving people's problems.”

Good idea, she heard herself say.

He stared at her. “I am going home to take over my father's computer repair business.” A moment later, with a small formal bow, he added, “You are a sympathetic person. May you have success with your endeavors.”

After Ahmed returned to the kitchen she went back to her laptop and her notes. She was typing up her grant proposal. Dr. Awolowo had proposed her for a university fellowship.

It is my hope that this community, which might be declared by reason of its insularity, economic security, and lack of significant cultural or manufacturing achievement to be of no interest, be reassessed as providing strategic research materials that may be applied generally to questions of . . .

The working title for her monograph on Littlefield was
Never Enough: Toward a Sociocultural Theory of Trained Incapacity and Discontent in an American Middle-Class Village and the Effects of Global Destabilization on Conceptualizations of Good Quality of Life
. She had planned the first chapter: a case study of Margaret Downing. Margaret would serve as the “face” of Littlefield.

On Clarice's steno pad, open beside her laptop, were the following handwritten notes:

Overeducated and unemployed, M.D. is married to a latent pedophile whose investment firm is under investigation for insider trading, while she herself conducts an affair. Her adolescent daughter, J., has responded to the deviant behavior of both parents by deliberately walking onto the thin ice of a local pond—a YouTube video of which incident has been widely viewed. A few months later, she lost herself and another child in the woods, perhaps in a second attempt to gain widespread social media attention. J. is an example of today's technology-addicted but intellectually crippled middle-class youth, depressed, overscheduled, poorly served by the public education system and by so-called helicopter parents, simultaneously overprotective and neglectful.

M.D. herself responds to stress by turning to alcohol. At a holiday dinner party, she collapsed in front of guests and several children; over the objections of her husband, she was then carried up to her bedroom in the arms of the man who subsequently became her lover . . .

Like her once pleasant village, turned into a place of suspicion and fear by a spree of dog poisonings, M.D. seems menaced by forces beyond her control . . .

. . . her own dog turned from pet to vicious . . .

. . . she is the embodiment, therefore, of the phenomenon of . . .

Clarice frowned at her notes.

“A way of seeing is also a way of not seeing,” she often told her students, quoting Kenneth Burke. To focus on object A, she explained, involves a neglect of object B.

But the problems of Margaret Downing were all too obvious. The ennui of a loveless marriage, resulting in attempts to connect with external sources of emotional intensity: elaborate seasonal decorations; sentimental German music played endlessly on the piano; and, of course, the banal affair with a sexist male novelist, whose emphasis on sports culture epitomized the phallocentric world that simultaneously rejected and enslaved her, leading to the inevitable emphasis on youthful appearance amid the decline of middle age—blond salon highlights, yoga classes, skin coddled daily with serums and moisturizers that cost as much as the yearly income of a bean farmer in Rajasthan—all adding up to the worst kind of social blight: the completely self-absorbed human being.

Like the lungs of frogs, Margaret Downing exhibited unusual simplicity and transparency. One could almost see her blood circulate. In the wilderness of life, she was a view of mown lawn. She was the famous sketch from Leonardo's notebooks, multiple arms and legs pointing in various directions, going nowhere.

But Margaret could not be simultaneously a frog, a view, a sketch by Leonardo. Or perhaps she could, which made her something else altogether.

Clarice recalled Margaret's toast at Christmas:
To all of our troubles!
Margaret at the book club meeting, her pale, strained face.
All I do these days is worry . . . about everything.
Margaret's desolate voice from the other side of the dark hedge, floating in the evening air.
What do you mean, it's okay?

And then an incident from several weeks ago: Margaret in her silver station wagon, big black dog in the backseat, stopped at a red light on Brooks Street. She was staring straight ahead, holding the steering wheel, tears sliding down her face. Then the light changed and Margaret drove on. What had she been weeping over this time? Husband? Lover? Her sad skinny child? Perhaps she was not completely self-absorbed. She was weeping about everything. But did it matter? To notice and weep, to worry and yet do nothing in particular?

Clarice discovered that she had spilled coffee on her steno pad. After blotting the spill with a napkin, she resumed typing. Behind her the bang and clatter of pots and dishes in the kitchen grew louder; the voices of men at the counter, grumbling about last night's Red Sox game, grew more insistent; the gabbling of a woman at her left, speaking into a cell phone about spending a hundred dollars on a pair of sandals she didn't need but thought were cute but now wasn't sure she liked, became deafening. All that noise steeped in the acrid smell of coffee, which had left an ashy taste in her mouth.

She stopped typing.

Why had she ever expected these people to be happy? Because they were comfortable?

What a fool she had been. She had figured the people of Littlefield would be balanced. Rich enough that they didn't worry about food and shelter and safety, but not so rich that they never worried about food and shelter and safety. Balanced. Especially because they were all in therapy, investigating their fears rationally, with the care and absorption of scientists. That, she had believed, was the secret of good quality of life. Rational balance. But instead she had stumbled onto the most unbalanced people of all: they were afraid of everything. They projected their fears onto everything. Everything they could do nothing about, but had the wit to recognize. The whole world surrounded them: a black forest crawling with beasts and creatures, phantoms, monsters.

She stared at the unfinished paragraph of her grant proposal. She'd had too much bad coffee, she could not hear herself think.

What had been neglected? What object overlooked?

You are a sympathetic person
.

Her fingers trembled as she reached for her water glass just as a UPS truck lumbered by outside on Brooks Street, making the water in her glass tremble. Even the sunlight trembled, slanting through the windowpane beside her, falling warm as a hand on her bare arm.

S
oft lavender shadows stretched across the quieting
lanes and byways of Littlefield; but the light, of course, was what everyone noticed. The dense honey-colored light of early June evenings, falling in broad bands across lawns, shining through the scissor-cut red leaves of a Japanese maple, illuminating cascades of purple rhododendron blooms, each within its own dusky corona of sunlight. Such elegiac light, gilding every driveway cobble, every deck rail, gleaming along the curve of every outdoor grill. Flowing across the village and into the park, spotlighting each milkweed tuft drifting across the soccer field, falling back just at the edge of the woods, where ferns, tall and luxuriant, were joined by lady's slippers and that most mysterious of plants: jack-in-the-pulpit, its knobby identity hidden under a striped, curled, jade-colored leaf. What force of nature could have dreamed of such a thing? The breeze picked up; lawns sank deeper into velvety shadow; the trees swooned with a deep, watery rush, and a bird sang out five notes like links in a silvery chain.

— —

Bill was fixing a supper
of pasta and tomato sauce from a jar for himself and Julia. Margaret was already at Duncklee Middle School—he had just dropped her off, her car was in the shop—doing a final run-through before accompanying the chorus in tonight's Spring Concert. Bill and Julia planned to attend the performance in half an hour.

In the kitchen he hustled from sink to stove to counter, heating the tomato sauce in the microwave while the pasta boiled, setting out baby carrots in a bowl, finding half a loaf of French bread in the bread box, only slightly stale. As he moved about the kitchen, he kept imagining he saw the dark shape of Binx asleep in his crate in the mudroom. Every so often he thought he heard a small groan.

Poor crazy bastard.

Because he did not want to get tomato sauce on his white shirt, Bill wore a blue apron he'd given to Margaret for her birthday a few weeks before. The white letters on the apron read:
I'D RATHER BE PLAYING SCHUMANN
. Ordered online, from a company that would print whatever you wanted on almost anything: T-shirts, balloons, wallpaper. He was proud of this gift idea, gratified when Margaret said, “Where on earth did you find it?” When he'd put on the apron five minutes ago Julia had actually laughed.

“I can't believe you're making dinner,” she'd said just now, sitting at the kitchen island with her glass of milk, long brown hair tied back in a ponytail. “You're a terrible cook.”

“Says you. Sit back and watch the master gourmet.”

“Master of mess,” she said.

He was feeling a little better tonight; in fact he'd been feeling a little better every day, slowly coming back to life. He'd just gotten off the phone with Passano, who'd been looking at office space in the Back Bay for the consulting company they might start. Downing & Passano. It looked like Roche Capital might not be kaput after all. Last week a district court judge had ruled that the electronic surveillance of their computers had been illegal and recommended the federal charges against Roche be dropped. Roche was quoted in the papers saying he was going to sue the SEC. “In the America of our forefathers, a man did not get punished for success and hard work.” Some punishment. Six months of sunning himself on a rock in Sedona. But it would help to have Roche more or less in the clear. A few of the old clients might come back. Passano & Downing? Money would be tight, especially at first. A couple of rooms with plain white walls and some cheap furniture, two guys in shirtsleeves answering their own phones, eating subs from Quiznos at their computers.
That
'
s
the America of our forefathers.

As for him and Margaret, oddly enough, ever since she told him about George Wechsler, they'd been getting along much better. What they'd both been dreading had happened: one of them had finally thrown in the towel and now at least they had something to talk about.

They had a regular late-afternoon appointment with Dr. Vogel, four thirty on Thursdays. Often when they left her office they went across the street to the Tavern to continue talking. At that hour the Tavern was still almost empty; they sat at the back, always choosing the same dark booth, with a battered table and worn plush banquettes that smelled anciently of beer. The tabletop was made of rough pine planks stained a sodden-looking umber, the varnish pitted and gouged by forks and knives dropped clumsily or dug into the wood, the exposed mortise and tenon joints coming apart.

Over the table hung a framed print of people in red jackets on horseback amid a swarm of leaping hounds. Between them a candle flickered in a greasy bubbled holder of pinkish glass. Mostly they talked about Julia—what to tell her, when to tell her. Julia had hardly spoken to Margaret since Binx had to be put down, looked at Margaret as if she were a toad or a frog. She was nicer to Bill.

Separation anxiety. That's what Dr. Vogel said.

“She is separating me from my wits,” said Margaret.

It was all her worries about Julia, that's what she'd been seeing, she told him, when she thought she saw those dogs. She was very cogent about it now, almost businesslike. She did not believe in ghosts. It was all neurosis. Not sleeping, not eating, the difficulties they'd been having, trying to suppress her fears—all of that had made her unbalanced, so that her mind had shown her what she was afraid to see. Just as Dr. Vogel said: anxiety. She was going to get a prescription for a new medication, just approved by the FDA. Naomi knew someone, a psychopharmacologist.

“I can't spend my life worrying about Julia,” she told Bill.

But some evenings they left off talking about Julia and leaned across the battered wooden table, faces aglow from the candle, and talked about what had happened to them. They went back to when they'd first met, and examined the ways in which their lives had been predictable and ways in which they were still surprised by how everything had turned out. How could they have once had no idea life could be so hard?