Let's Take the Long Way Home (18 page)

An hour later, at dusk, after I had unpacked the car with Clemmie by my side, one of the nurses came back and knocked on my door. “Mrs. C wondered if you could stop by,” she said shyly. “She wants to see the big white dog.” Clemmie had grown up around a neighbor in a wheelchair, so I wasn’t concerned about her being gentle, and when we went inside the house, she walked over to Mrs. C’s wheelchair and placed herself next to her hand. The woman’s clouded eyes lit up, and she smiled as she ran her hand through Clementine’s ruff. “I like a
big
dog,” she said by way of introduction; she spoke with un-hesitant authority, as though we had just picked up a long-running conversation in which her opinion mattered greatly. However frail the rest of her was, all her strength was in her voice. “When I was growing up, I had Alsatians,” she told me, her voice warm with memory. “They used to run through the woods here and terrify everyone.” She smiled as she told me this story, and for a moment I could see her as a girl, fearless in the wilds of midcentury Truro, protected by her shepherd dogs and running free.

I’ve always thought there would be worse fates than to
be that woman, bowed but undaunted by everything physical in life, her memories and imperious presence outshining the waning light of aging. A woman still able to summon to her side a creature that nearly outweighed her; still able to say, with glad conviction, “I like a
big
dog.” I like a big dog, too.

“THE HEART BREAKS
OPEN,”
A FRIEND SAID TO ME
upon Clementine’s death. I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures. Sometimes I think that the pain is what yields the solution. Grief and memory create their own narrative: This is the shining truth at the heart of Freud and Neruda and every war story ever told. The death mandates and gives rise to the story for the same reason that ancient tribes used to bury flowers with their dead. We tell the story to get them back, to capture the traces of footfalls through the snow.

After Caroline died, I made a list of things I wanted to accomplish before my life was over: write a book, go to Paris, find a great love, fit in as many dogs as I could. Oh, and find God, I said to a friend, the postscript that might change the world entire. Not a very long list, but everything on it seemed essential. I set out to achieve these things both systematically and unconsciously, aware that the map of one’s life is made up of luck and circumstance
and determination. I had always told Caroline that when I lost Clementine, I planned to go to Paris, cry my heart out for six months, then come home and get a puppy.

Paris is still on the list. The spring of Clemmie’s decline was exhausting and heartbreaking, and I was no more fit to travel abroad when she was gone than I was to bike to the moon. Instead I spent the summer in the shadows of sorrow and anxiety, wondering how I would navigate the world without her in it. The very fact of me felt diminished.

I laid the flowers people brought me on her denning spot by the yew, and when they had yellowed I piled more on top, so that there was a pallet of dried flowers where she had lain. I sat on the porch and talked to her, as I had talked to Caroline after she was gone and to Clemmie throughout her life. I found out from listening to memory and silence that I didn’t much care, at least then, about going to Paris. That what I wanted was the breath in the house and the warmth and demands of someone who needed me. “It’s
your
love,” my old friend Pete had said to me years before, when I was trying to leave a lousy relationship. “You get to keep that.” My love: precious, lonely gift.

I spent an hour one afternoon on the phone with a breeder of Border collies, a stranger who understood my distress and stayed in touch with me for months afterward, toward no other end than kindness. Peter, who had helped save Clementine that cold day years before, knew
what I had lost but couldn’t express it, so most days, after he and Shiloh, his young Belgian shepherd, had had their run, he would open my back door and holler, “Dog!” In she would come, my auxiliary shepherd for the morning, who had long since added me to her pack and who probably sensed Clemmie’s departure before she was gone. Shiloh would lie down beside me for an hour while I wrote, as focused and calm as a visiting nurse.

THE OLD NAVAJO WEAVERS
used to insert an unmatched thread into each of their rugs, a contrasting color that runs to the outside edge. You can spot an authentic rug by this intentional flaw, which is called a spirit line, meant to release the energy trapped inside the rug and pave the way for the next creation.

Every story in life worth holding on to has to have a spirit line. You can call this hope or tomorrow or the “and then” of narrative itself, but without it—without that bright, dissonant fact of the unknown, of what we cannot control—consciousness and everything with it would tumble inward and implode. The universe insists that what is fixed is also finite.

ON A BRIGHT, HOT
day at the end of summer, I got on a plane not to Paris but to Baltimore, on a mission more circuitous and less glamorous than a trip to the Louvre. I
rented a car at the Baltimore airport and started driving from Maryland across rural Pennsylvania, on my way to meet a breeder of Samoyeds whose dogs I had seen a decade before. That part of the state has a rustic, southern feel, full of back roads and green, rolling hills, with barn stars on half the houses. I had been up since dawn and was alone and half lost, wondering what in the hell I was doing on a lonely stretch of Pennsylvania when I might have been in Italy, say, or Montana, or the south of France. I passed a small highway marker, as discreet as a street sign, that read
MASON DIXON LINE
, and my heart fluttered in response.

Just beyond the marker, on the other side of the road, was a seedy-looking liquor store with a purple neon sign. I traveled a lot when I was a drinker—alcohol gave me the high-octane courage to go anywhere—and wherever I landed, the first thing I did, had to do, was find the nearest liquor store. I always pretended it was a mission of desire, but it felt like a prison sentence. When I drove past the store in Pennsylvania, its parking lot half full of cars in the early afternoon, I had a flash of what it had been like to have to do that, to locate the place that warehoused my bottle of hope.

But the store with its flashing light—
LIQUOR
—also reminded me of something else from years before that nearly made me laugh aloud. When I was growing up in Texas, whenever a fellow was going to the liquor store or stepping out to the car to have a snort, the colloquial expression
was “I’ve got to see a man about a dog.” Now here I was, so many miles and decades later, sober and heartsore and still alive, and I really did have to see someone about a dog. She was part of a litter that had been born in June, and though I hadn’t laid eyes on her, I had already named her: Tula, a wonderful old southern name I’d always loved. I had searched out the name’s origins and loved it even more. Tula was from the Sanskrit for “balance,” or from “tulayati,” meaning “to lift up.”

The clouds ran on ahead of me and I crossed into Gettysburg, a place of such sacred ground and memory that it threw my own life into the panoramic mist where it belonged. I drove into the military park and onto the old battlegrounds, and I stopped at the cemetery long enough to pay my respects. Then I got back in the car and kept on going.

MY EDITOR, KATE MEDINA, UNDERSTOOD THE VISION
of this book from its conception; my thanks are on every page. Louise Erdrich, darkling sister, was invaluable as both writer and friend. My agent, Lane Zachary, offered her usual blend of enthusiasm and Buddhist calm. Andrea Cohen, poet and jokester, reminded me always of the seriousness of humor.

The emotional staying power I needed to tell this story came from many sources. For their grace and kindness, within the story itself and to me afterward, my great thanks and love to Mark Morelli, Sandra Shea, Rebecca Knapp, and David Herzog.

My home fires were tended by an exceptional group of friends: Peter and Pat Wright, Kathy and Leo De Natale, Avery Rimer, Rick Weissbourd, Peter James, Marjorie Gatchell, Eliza Gagnon, Louisa Williams, and the Saturday night gang. Amy Kantor and Beth
Shepherd took care of me in every way. I know it would make Caroline happy that this list is so long and full. Finally, my love and gratitude to Dick Chasin, who knew the depth of my grief as well as the journey through it.

G
AIL
C
ALDWELL
was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism in 2001. She is the former chief book critic of
The Boston Globe
and the author of
A Strong West Wind
. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Discussion Questions for
Let’s Take the Long Way Home
by Gail Caldwell

1. The book’s subtitle is “A Memoir of Friendship.” Why it is not simply “A Memoir,” and what does this say about the book as a whole? Whose story, at heart, would you say this is?

2. Caldwell writes, “Finding Caroline was like placing a personal ad for an imaginary friend, then having her show up at your door funnier and better than you had conceived.” She goes on to describe their “tatting center,” and the secret codes that tied their lives together. To what degree do you think the strength of a friendship depends on being able to disappear into an imaginary world together, to develop a secret code that only the friends understand? How do you see this playing out in
Let’s Take the Long Way Home?
What about in your own life?

3. Gail and Caroline have a great deal in common, but they also have very different personalities. There is a darker edge to their friendship, too: Caldwell calls it a “swampland,” “the world of envy and rivalry and self-doubt,” the competitiveness between the two women in their writing, on the water, and in life. In what ways are they similar, and in what ways different? Do you think these elements strengthen or weaken their bond?

4. Both Gail and Caroline have relationships with men, and yet the core of their friendship seems to contain a singular intimacy of the kind that exists between women. Does that bond call to mind friendships or relationships in your own life?

5. In a scene on the Harvard University sports fields, Caldwell says, “We used to laugh that people with common sense or without dogs were somewhere in a warm restaurant, or traveling, or otherwise living the sort of life that all of us think, from time to time, that we ought to be living or at least desiring.” One of the things Gail and Caroline discuss in the course of their friendship is whether they are “living their lives correctly”—whether they are taking full advantage of the time they have. Do you think there is a “correct” way to live, and if so, what do you think should dictate the priorities? Is it realistic to try to avoid wasting time, or is that necessary to “correct living”? Do you think
Let’s Take the Long Way Home
offers any kind of answer to this question?

6. “What they never tell you about grief is that missing someone is the simple part.” What do you think Caldwell means by this?

7. In what ways does Clementine’s arrival change Gail’s life, on both a practical and an emotional level? She compares dog ownership to having children, but makes the point that “this mysterious, intelligent animal I had brought into my life seemed to me not a stand-in, but a blessing.”

8. As the author is struggling to overcome her alcoholism, she has two conversations that help change the way she sees the world and her experiences. In one, a therapist tells her that “If … I could keep only
one thing
about you, it would be your too-muchness.” Later, her alcoholism counselor, Rich, says, “Don’t you
know?
The
flaw is the thing we love.” Do you agree? Can you think of examples, in the book or in your own life, that prove or disprove these ideas?

9.
Let’s Take the Long Way Home
doesn’t have a memoir’s traditional, chronological narrative structure. How do you think this contributes to the effect and emotional impact of the book overall? Does it reflect the nature of the friendship itself? Could Caldwell have told her story any other way?

10. Do you see Gail, as a character, change in the course of the book—having discovered, and then lost, both Caroline and Clementine? What would you say she has gained?

11. Caldwell tells a moving anecdote about using the “alpha roll” while she is training Clementine. It is a technique meant to establish the dog owner’s authority, but it doesn’t work at all on the mischievous puppy; as she continues to try and fail, Caldwell suddenly sees a parallel between her own childhood relationship with her father and senses that the whole approach is wrong. “From that moment on, everything changed between us. Wherever I danced, she followed.” What lessons might we all learn from this story?

12. Loss is at the center of the book—we know from the first several pages that Caroline will die—and Caldwell writes about the new world without Caroline in it, where she experienced rage and despair and “the violence of time itself.” Does her description of grief mirror any of your own experiences?