The Boys of My Youth (11 page)

The collie turns and looks, waits to be carried up the two steps. Inside the house, she drops like a shoe onto her blanket,
a thud, an adjustment. I’ve climbed back under my covers already but her leg’s stuck underneath her, we can’t get comfortable.
I fix the leg, she rolls over and sleeps. Two hours later I wake up again and she’s gazing at me in the darkness. The face
of love. She wants to go out again. I give her a boost, balance her on her legs. Right on time: 3:40
A.M.

There are squirrels living in the spare bedroom upstairs. Three dogs also live in this house, but they were invited. I keep
the door of the spare bedroom shut at all times, because of the squirrels and because that’s where the vanished husband’s
belongings are stored. Two of the dogs — the smart little brown mutt and the Labrador — spend hours sitting patiently outside
the door, waiting for it to be opened so they can dismantle the squirrels. The collie can no longer make it up the stairs,
so she lies at the bottom and snores or stares in an interested manner at the furniture around her.

I can take almost anything at this point. For instance, that my vanished husband is neither here nor there; he’s reduced himself
to a troubled voice on the telephone three or four times a day.

Or that the dog at the bottom of the stairs keeps having mild
strokes which cause her to tilt her head inquisitively and also to fall over. She drinks prodigious amounts of water and pees
great volumes onto the folded blankets where she sleeps. Each time this happens I stand her up, dry her off, put fresh blankets
underneath her, carry the peed-on blankets down to the basement, stuff them into the washer and then into the dryer. By the
time I bring them back upstairs they are needed again. The first few times this happened I found the dog trying to stand up,
gazing with frantic concern at her own rear. I praised her and patted her head and gave her treats until she settled down.
Now I know whenever it happens because I hear her tail thumping against the floor in anticipation of reward. In retraining
her I’ve somehow retrained myself, bustling cheerfully down to the basement, arms drenched in urine, the task of doing load
after load of laundry strangely satisfying. She is Pavlov and I am her dog.

I’m fine about the vanished husband’s boxes stored in the spare bedroom. For now the boxes and the phone calls persuade me
that things could turn around at any moment. The boxes are filled with thirteen years of his pack-rattedness: statistics textbooks
that still harbor an air of desperation, smarmy suitcoats from the Goodwill, various old Halloween masks and one giant black
papier-mâché thing that was supposed to be Elvis’s hair but didn’t turn out. A collection of ancient Rolling Stones T-shirts.
You know he’s turning over a new leaf when he leaves the Rolling Stones behind.

What I can’t take are the squirrels. They come alive at night, throwing terrible parties in the spare bedroom, making thumps
and crashes. Occasionally a high-pitched squeal is heard amid bumps and the sound of scrabbling toenails. taken to sleeping
downstairs, on the blue vinyl dog couch, the sheets slipping off, my skin stuck to the cushions. This is an affront to two
of the dogs, who know the couch belongs to them;
as soon as I settle in they creep up and find their places between my knees and elbows.

I’m on the couch because the dog on the blanket gets worried at night. During the day she sleeps the catnappy sleep of the
elderly, but when it gets dark her eyes open and she is agitated, trying to stand whenever I leave the room, settling down
only when I’m next to her. We are in this together, the dying game, and I read for hours in the evening, one foot on her back,
getting up only to open a new can of beer or take peed-on blankets to the basement. At some point I stretch out on the vinyl
couch and close my eyes, one hand hanging down, touching her side. By morning the dog-arm has become a nerveless club that
doesn’t come around until noon. My friends think I’m nuts.

One night, for hours, the dog won’t lie down, stands braced on her rickety legs in the middle of the living room, looking
at me and slowly wagging her tail. Each time I get her situated on her blankets and try to stretch out on the couch she stands
up, looks at me, wags her tail. I call my office pal, Mary, and wake her up.
“I’m weary,”
I say, in italics.

Mary listens, sympathetic, on the other end. “Oh my God,” she finally says,
“what
are you going to do?”

I calm down immediately. “Exactly what I’m doing,” I tell her. The dog finally parks herself with a thump on the stack of
damp blankets. She sets her nose down and tips her eyes up to watch me. We all sleep then, for a bit, while the squirrels
sort through the boxes overhead and the dog on the blanket keeps nervous watch.

I’ve called in tired to work. It’s midmorning and I’m shuffling around in my long underwear, smoking cigarettes and drinking
coffee. The whole house is bathed in sunlight and the faint
odor of used diapers. The collie is on her blanket, taking one of her vampirish daytime naps. The other two dogs are being
mild-mannered and charming. I nudge the collie with my foot.

“Wake up and smell zee bacons,” I say. She startles awake, lifts her nose groggily, and falls back asleep. I get ready for
the office.

“I’m leaving and I’m never coming back,” I say while putting on my coat. I use my mother’s aggrieved, underappreciated tone.
The little brown dog wags her tail, transferring her gaze from me to the table, which is the last place she remembers seeing
toast. The collie continues her ghoulish sleep, eyes partially open, teeth exposed, while the Labrador, who understands English,
begins howling miserably. She wins the toast sweepstakes and is chewing loudly when I leave, the little dog barking ferociously
at her.

Work is its usual comforting green-corridored self. There are three blinks on the answering machine, the first from an author
who speaks very slowly, like a kindergarten teacher, asking about reprints. “What am I, the village idiot?” I ask the room,
taking down his number in large backward characters. The second and third blinks are from my husband, the across-town apartment
dweller.

The first makes my heart lurch in a hopeful way. “I have to talk to you right
now
,” he says grimly. “Where
are
you? I can never find you.”

“Try calling your own house,” I say to the machine. In the second message he has composed himself.

“I’m
fine
now,” he says firmly. “Disregard previous message and don’t call me back, please; I have meetings.” Click, dial tone, rewind.

I feel crestfallen, the leaping heart settles back into its hole
in my chest. I say damn it out loud, just as Chris strides into the office.

“What?” he asks defensively. He tries to think if he’s done anything wrong recently. He checks the table for work; none there.
He’s on top of it. We have a genial relationship these days, reading the paper together in the mornings, congratulating ourselves
on each issue of the journal. It’s a space physics quarterly and he’s the editor and I’m the managing editor. I know nothing
about the science part; my job is to shepherd the manuscripts through the review process and create a journal out of the acceptable
ones.

Christoph Goertz. He’s hip in a professorial kind of way, tall and lanky and white-haired, forty-seven years old, with an
elegant trace of accent from his native Germany. He has a great dog, a giant black outlaw named Mica who runs through the
streets of Iowa City at night, inspecting garbage. She’s big and friendly but a bad judge of character and frequently runs
right into the arms of the dog catcher. Chris is always bailing her out.

“They don’t understand dogs,” he says.

I spend more time with Chris than I ever did with my husband. The morning I told him I was being dumped he was genuinely perplexed.

“He’s leaving
you?
” he asked.

Chris was drinking coffee, sitting at his table in front of the chalkboard. Behind his head was a chalk drawing of a hip,
professorial man holding a coffee cup. It was a collaborative effort; I drew the man and Chris framed him, using brown chalk
and a straightedge. The two-dimensional man and the three-dimensional man stared at me intently.

“He’s leaving
you?
” And for an instant I saw myself from their vantage point across the room — Jo Ann — and a small bubble of self-esteem percolated
up from the depths. Chris shrugged. “You’ll do fine,” he said.

During my current turmoils, I’ve come to think of work as my own kind of zen practice, the constant barrage of paper hypnotic
and soothing. Chris lets me work an erratic, eccentric schedule, which gives me time to pursue my nonexistent writing career.
In return I update his publications list for him and listen to stories about outer space.

Besides being an editor and a teacher, he’s the head of a theoretical plasma physics team made up of graduate students and
research scientists. During the summers he travels all over the world telling people about the magnetospheres of various planets,
and when he comes back he brings me presents — a small bronze box from Africa with an alligator embossed on the top, a big
piece of amber from Poland with the wings of flies preserved inside it, and, once, a set of delicate, horrifying bracelets
made from the hide of an elephant.

Currently he is obsessed with the dust in the plasma of Saturn’s rings. Plasma is the fourth state of matter. You’ve got your
solid, your liquid, your gas, and then your plasma. In outer space there’s the plasmasphere and the plasmapause. I like to
avoid the math when I can and put a layperson’s spin on these things.

“Plasma is blood,” I told him.

“Exactly,” he agreed, removing the comics page and handing it to me.

Mostly we have those kinds of conversations around the office, but today he’s caught me at a weak moment, tucking my heart
back inside my chest. I decide to be cavalier.

“I wish my
dog
was out tearing up the town and my
husband
was home peeing on a blanket,” I say.

Chris thinks the dog thing has gone far enough. “Why are you letting this go on?” he asks solemnly.

“I’m not
letting
it, that’s why,” I tell him. There are stacks of manuscripts everywhere and he has all the pens over on his side of the room.
“It just
is
, is all. Throw me a pen.” He does, I
miss it, stoop to pick it up, and when I straighten up again I might be crying.

You have control over this, he explains in his professor voice. You can decide how long she suffers.

This makes my heart pound. Absolutely not, I cannot do it. And then I weaken and say what I really want. For her to go to
sleep and not wake up, just slip out of her skin and into the other world.

“Exactly,” he says.

I have an ex—beauty queen coming over to get rid of the squirrels for me. She has long red hair and a smile that can stop
trucks. I’ve seen her wrestle goats, scare off a giant snake, and express a dog’s anal glands, all in one afternoon. I told
her on the phone that a family of squirrels is living in the upstairs of my house and there’s nothing I can do about it.

“They’re making a monkey out of me,” I said.

So Caroline climbs in her car and drives across half the state, pulls up in front of my house, and gets out carrying zucchinis,
cigarettes, and a pair of big leather gloves. I’m sitting outside with my sweet old dog, who lurches to her feet, staggers
three steps, sits down, and falls over. Caroline starts crying.

“Don’t try to give me zucchini,” I tell her.

We sit companionably on the front stoop for a while, staring at the dog and smoking cigarettes. One time I went to Caroline’s
house and she was nursing a dead cat that was still breathing. At some point that afternoon I saw her spoon baby food into
its mouth and as soon as she turned away the whole pureed mess plopped back out. A day later she took it to the vet and had
it euthanized. I remind her of this.

“You’ll do it when you do it,” she says firmly.

I pick the collie up like a fifty-pound bag of sticks and feathers, stagger inside, place her on the damp blankets, and put
the
other two nutcases in the backyard. From upstairs comes a crash and a shriek. Caroline stares up at the ceiling.

“It’s like having the Wallendas stay at your house,” I say cheerfully. All of a sudden I feel fond of the squirrels and fond
of Caroline and fond of myself for heroically calling her to help me. The phone rings four times. It’s the husband, and his
voice over the answering machine sounds frantic. He pleads with whoever Jo Ann is to pick up the phone.

“Please? I think I might be freaking out,” he says. “Am I ruining my life here, or what? Am I making a
mistake?
Jo?” He breathes raggedly and sniffs into the receiver for a moment, then hangs up with a muffled clatter.

Caroline stares at the machine like it’s a copperhead.

“Holy fuckoly,” she says, shaking her head. “You’re
living
with this crap?”

“He wants me to reassure him that he’s strong enough to leave me,” I tell her. “Else he won’t have fun on his bike ride. And
guess what; I’m too tired to.” Except that now I can see him in his dank little apartment, wringing his hands and staring
out the windows. He’s wearing his Sunday hairdo with a baseball cap trying to scrunch it down. In his rickety dresser is the
new package of condoms he accidentally showed me last week.

Caroline lights another cigarette. The dog pees and thumps her tail.

I need to call him back because he’s suffering.

“You call him back and I’m forced to kill you,” Caroline says. She exhales smoke and points to the phone. “That is evil shit,”
she says.

I tend to agree. It’s blanket time. I roll the collie off onto the floor and put the fresh ones down, roll her back. She stares
at me with the face of love. I get her a treat, which she chews with gusto and then goes back to sleep. I carry the blankets
down to
the basement and stuff them into the machine, trudge back up the stairs. Caroline has finished smoking her medicine and is
wearing the leather gloves which go all the way to her elbows. She’s staring at the ceiling with determination.