A Three Dog Life (7 page)

The next morning I can barely walk. My friend Claudette comes to the rescue. She puts Carolina on a leash lest a pack of hormone-addled canines show up in my yard, and later she drives me to her acupuncturist. I have never been to an acupuncturist but I'm ready for help here. The process is very interesting, all those needles tingling in my feet and legs and hands, and so relaxing that I would probably doze off were it not for the needle stuck right under my nose. I just can't stop thinking about that one. Nevertheless I do feel better until I hit the dairy case at the Hurley Ridge Market and reach for half a gallon of milk. On the way back through town we drive past the half-dressed youth of Woodstock lying on the village green. They are a beautiful sight, but what with my bad back and good memory I am glad not to be one of them. They have far too much future.

Meanwhile, my fat beagle, Harry, has found himself capable of leaping straight up into the air like Rudolf Nureyev. If Carolina doesn't notice, and she doesn't, he does it again. He is no longer capable of reproducing, but that doesn't dampen his spirit. Rosie too is affected by whatever hormones are flying. She engages in much vigorous grooming, attending obsessively to the nooks and crannies of both Harry and Carolina. She would have made an excellent mother. Now and then Carolina rouses herself long enough to emit a howl. Everybody's getting hot around here except me. I am just beginning to wonder where all the would-be suitors are when a big white dog materializes in the driveway. Ha! Carolina's first admirer. Harry and Rosie take up their positions on the back porch barking their heads off and I call my sister Judy and tell her proudly we've got an intact husky hanging around who probably never finished grammar school. "Now you know how Mom and Dad felt," she says. I go outside holding Carolina's leash in one hand, and a mop in the other. The mop doubles as cane and threat, and I shake it at the ruffian when he comes too close. He looks at Carolina and she looks back. Oh yeah, I remember that look. If this animal were human he'd be wearing jeans and a white T-shirt. He'd be lighting a cigarette. Forget my bad back, my advanced years. If this animal were human and I were in Carolina's shoes, let's face it, I'd be all over him like white on rice.

Last October when my furnace broke and the weather got cold and colder, when I woke up and the temperature inside the bedroom was forty degrees or thirty-eight degrees, when the dogs and I stayed under the covers until our bladders were bursting, I vowed never to forget, never again to take heat for granted. But I did forget. And now it's summer and the electricity is out. My red slipcovers are soaking in the stalled washing machine while my furniture sits around in its underwear. I can't run the vacuum cleaner or have toast. One minute I was knitting, the radio on, the fan blowing in my face, and the next minute everything went still. I have not got to where I vow to remember this. But we don't get to choose what sticks. How many times I have run my fingers along a picket fence and thought, "This! I will remember this moment always!" and all that remains is the memory of a desire to hold on to a memory. My uncle told me that every fall the dragonflies in Brazil return to the lake where they were born to touch down once more before dying. I have taken it on myself to remember this for him.

I don't like it when somebody remembers something I love better than I do. There are places I don't often mention lest somebody remember more than I do—Sneden's Landing, say, where we lived for a few years in the 1950s. My sister Judy had more friends, and she has a better memory, and when she turns on her brights I stand exposed, stripped of detail, unworthy to have lived there at all. But I remember streams we followed downhill to the river, and where we once searched for a plant with a silver leaf and thick juicy stems which cured poison ivy. What its name was, whether we found any, and who had poison ivy I can't recall. I remember a beautiful dark waterfall and the deep pool it fell into, and the columns and grape arbor that stood around. If you put your foot in the icy water you went numb up to your knee. I remember the Hudson at low tide and finding treasures in the smelly mud, once a smooth piece of carved jade and lots of broken china. I remember lying on a jetty that extended off somebody's front lawn and listening to the water and realizing that an airplane's drone had become a sound as natural as rain or crickets.

I remember a month or two when our mother took it into her head to serve tea when we got home from school. I remember her asking, "Black? Or white?" meaning milk or not. My memory gives this all an ironic twist, as if our mother knew she was playing at tea party, but I think part of her took this seriously. She showed so much care, there was the tray, there was the pot of tea and another of hot water, there were sugar lumps instead of sugar ("One or two?" "Five, please."). I can't visualize the cups and saucers, but the cookies (were there cookies?) were almost certainly those not-cookies, the boring Petit Beurres she favored. Then one day there was no tea as if it had never happened.

I remember our mother conjugating the Latin verb
to love
and singing this to the tune of a popular song I've forgotten
(amo, amas, amat)
and us kids sliding down in our seats when she hollered it out the car window on our way up the hill to the Palisades Post Office. The ancient wisteria that grew by my windows is forever the smell of hot summer, and carries with it the memory of Tony Wallace, who taught me, very gently, how to French kiss. We were on a hill overlooking the Hudson.
Should my sister say she loves wisteria, that wisteria is her favorite flower, part of me wants to shout, "It grew outside MY window." But none of it belongs to me.

My god, Tony was a handsome boy. He had no curfew and a Nash Rambler and I could hear it coming from forty miles way. He invited me out, but at fifteen I was scared and shy, and five minutes before he was due to pick me up I'd beg my mother to tell him I was sick. Finally I went to his house for supper. I can't remember anything except the Ovaltine, which I was afraid to drink for fear the Haitian cook had put a voodoo spell on it. I've got a photograph of me with Tony printed on a matchbook from the Copacabana, where we went one night with his parents. He was seventeen and I was sixteen. My sister kept the matchbook safe for me for forty years. Then she handed it over. My eldest daughter framed it in a silver frame and gave it to me for Christmas as a surprise. In this photo you can see dark shadows under his eyes. My eyes look black—my pupils opening wide in the flash of the camera.

"How is Rich?" people ask. "Does he remember you?" Yes, he knows me and his daughter, Sally. He knows his granddaughter, Nora. The four of us spend Thursday afternoons together. Sally and the baby come down from Albany and I pick Rich up at the nursing home and drive him to my house in Woodstock. These days he seems to recognize sights along Route 28. Or does he? Maybe it's just his funny bone that's tickled when we pass the sign for Thomas's Pest Control, because he chuckles every time. Sometimes he remarks, "Here we are," when the church comes up on our left and we make the turn. "Hello, Shorty," he says to Harry, our old dog.

I don't know what happened to all Rich's memories. One of his favorites was the cool birch woods in Finland, where he once ran a race, a place he used to conjure up whenever he felt in a tight spot. He is very hard of hearing now, and that much conversation would be almost impossible. "Do you remember the woods in Finland?" I would have to shout, and then watch him struggle to hear, and then to make sense of what I said. Sometimes that is too sad. Besides, there is enough going on. "Do you want to use the bathroom?" Sally suggested to her father last week. He shook his head and asked, "Why? Do you have a dire need for fresh urine?" We laughed, and I wrote it down so I don't forget.

After lunch Rich always takes his old place by the sink and begins to wash the dishes. No part of him has forgotten the slow circling of the sponge on the face of the plate, or the careful rinsing of glasses or cleaning between the tines of a fork. When Sally and the baby leave to go home, Rich and I hold hands and wave good-bye from the porch. Later he will put on his reading glasses and take up the paper. The dogs will deposit themselves near our feet. The afternoon will slide into evening, and before it gets dark I will take him back to the place where he lives, but not yet. For now, he will look at the paper and I will look at him, and let what's over and done with disappear into the here and now.

An old refrigerator came with the house. It contained a half bottle of ketchup, a squeeze container of ballpark mustard, and an open jar of pickle relish. I appreciate how hard it is to throw such things away, and harder still to pack them up and move them with you, but other people's condiments are depressing. On top of that, unidentified odors leaked into the freezer; if you pulled out a vegetable drawer a shelf collapsed; and the outside was made of some wrinkled Naugahyde-like material you can't clean. (I don't know who invented this stuff, but it was surely not the hand that holds the sponge.) Anyway, I just never warmed up to this appliance, and I blamed it for the fact that except for Thanksgiving I never bought food. So two years later, armed with statistics from
Consumer Reports,
I marched off to Sears and three days after that, a brand-new, spanking clean appliance arrived in my kitchen.

This new baby gleams. The stainless steel exterior cost extra and it came with a bottle of special cleaner and instructions in three languages. The vegetable drawers have choices for degrees of crispness. The door can hold two half-gallon containers of milk side by side, the freezer is spacious and smells only of cold. There is even a separate shelf for eggs. The first week I bought yogurt and cottage cheese and apples and chicken and lettuce and cream. I had milk and orange juice and seltzer, and for my visiting daughter and her friends, beer. I even put water in the ice cube trays. I invited friends for supper and made my mother's famous potatoes—Gruyère cheese, heavy cream, red-hot pepper flakes, salt and pepper, nutmeg. And oh yes, potatoes. I made hot fudge sauce and stocked up on four pints of vanilla ice cream. And then a week went by and another and now the icebox is empty again. You won't find the makings of a ham and cheese sandwich, or even peanut butter and jelly. There's precious little in the way of greenery although a head of iceberg lettuce has stayed unnaturally crisp for several weeks in the vegetable drawer. I try to make up grocery lists but never get very far. I do always have coffee and dog food
(I love to buy dog food) and usually there's a pound of butter in the freezer. But I can't blame my poor shopping habits on the refrigerator anymore, this new one is begging to be filled.

Maybe it's because I'm a WASP. This reminds me of the cookbook I started to write years ago. It was to be a WASP cookbook and I was going to call it
The Goy of Cooking.
In a preface I never finished I noted that WASPs are not bad cooks, and we have lots of great recipes (think
popovers,
think
standing rib roast,
think
fudge).
Our problem lies in the fact that we never buy food. I abandoned the project, and never got to the bottom of this failing. (A friend offered me Marianne Moore's recipe for custard. I thanked her and said I had a recipe for custard already. "Oh but this is very WASPy," she went on. "It's custard
for one.
") On the other hand, when my kids were small my refrigerator was far from empty. I remember a lot of yogurt, cream cheese, jelly, peanut butter, American cheese slices, cheddar cheese, Roquefort, leftover apple pie (if there were leftovers), leftover brisket, apples, orange juice, butter, milk. Lettuce and tomatoes and onions and potatoes. For a while my freezer contained a bottle of vodka with a wisp of buffalo grass inside, and for a few bad years I took swigs of this syrupy concoction all day long.

***

Still, the WASP theory dies hard. I have only to remember taking my old friend Jerry to my mother's house in East Hampton. I heard a cry from the kitchen and went to see what was wrong. He was standing in front of the open refrigerator, pointing to its contents—a bottle of champagne and a jar of bitter marmalade, both sitting on doilies. And then there's the memory of my mother's frantic cry when any of us children headed toward the kitchen. "Don't eat anything!" In her later years as a great grandmother she plied us all with baked Brie and pâté and cookies. She broke off big pieces of chocolate bar beseeching us to eat. In the old days perhaps she had bought only enough food to last through supper. Maybe what we were eating were the ingredients of the evening meal. She was a good cook but sometimes meat was on the chewy side. On these occasions she glared at us as we valiantly gnawed our way through strips of beef. "Good tough meat," she would say in a challenging tone.

At the same time my refrigerator arrived I collapsed the dining room table and lined the walls with bookcases. I don't have a dining room sort of life—we eat on our laps in the kitchen if I have company—and this was a room I passed through to get somewhere else. It was useless, really, except for Thanksgiving. And now we're headed into fall, my favorite season, and there are empty bookcases all around me, and boxes of books in New York City waiting to be moved up here. I sit in this new room, trying it on for size, and discover that my house doesn't fit me anymore. Maybe it's because from here I can see into the empty kitchen, and then turn my head and look into the empty living room. On either side are these uninhabited rooms, quiet, waiting, but only for me, and I can't sit everywhere at once.

It occurs to me that eating is a social occasion. Living alone I don't have the energy for shopping, for cooking meals. The dogs and I do fine with me eating standing up and dropping bits of my makeshift supper—often this is buttered toast—into their mouths. But Rich comes on Thursdays, and Sally with Nora, and we have lunch together. Rich lost his sense of smell with the accident, and with it much of his ability to taste. Of all the catastrophic losses he suffered this one seemed gratuitous, and just plain mean. We'd had our favorite meals—baby flounder fried in butter and oil, which we ate with new potatoes and peas; home fries on a rainy afternoon. All this past winter I roasted chickens for Thursdays, or made omelets, but summer has been hot, and nowadays it's mostly deli takeout. Rich still loves to eat, but I don't know what he tastes.