Walking the Dog

Published in 2016 by the Feminist Press

at the City University of New York

The Graduate Center

365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 5406

New York, NY 10016

feministpress.org

First Feminist Press edition 2016

Copyright © 2016 by Elizabeth Swados

All rights reserved.

This book is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

This book was made possible thanks to a grant from New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

No part of this book may be reproduced, used, or stored in any information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the Feminist Press at the City University of New York, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

First printing June 2016

Cover design and text design by Suki Boynton

Names: Swados, Elizabeth, author.

Title: Walking the dog: a novel / Elizabeth Swados.

Description: New York: Feminist Press, 2016.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015048949 | ISBN 9781558619227 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Self-realization in women—Fiction. | Mothers and daughters—Fiction. | Parent and adult child—Fiction. | Ex-convicts—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Coming of Age. | FICTION / Contemporary Women. | PETS / Dogs / General.

Classification: LCC PS3569.W17 W35 2016 | DDC 813/.54--dc23

LC record available at
https://lccn.loc.gov/2015048949

This book is dedicated to

Judith Ginsberg

Rebecca Keren

Richard Sadowsky

and to Roz.

CONTENTS

  
COVER

  
TITLE PAGE

  
COPYRIGHT

  
DEDICATION

  
CONTENTS

  
THE EARLY DAYS OF FREEDOM

  
CLAYTON

  
LADIES WHO LUNCH

  
BEYONCÉ AND ARETHA

  
TIKKUN OLAM

  
SERVING TIME

  
DOORBELL

  
TRYING NOT TO GO BACKWARD

  
POOKIE THE TERROR

  
A LETTER TO BATYA SHULAMIT

  
THE HELL OF POWELL

  
PRISON WIFE

  
A LIFE OF LISTS

  
HALFWAY HOUSE

  
A PARTY WITH POOKIE

  
ANOTHER LETTER TO MADAME BATYA

  
THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

  
EARNING COURAGE

  
BOMBAST

  
THE ART OF TORTURE AT POWELL

  
THE ASSIGNMENT

  
LARRY, MOE, CURLY, AND DAVID

  
THE LAST DAYS OF POWELL

  
MY CRIMES

  
MY TESTIMONY FOR PONY

  
THE EARLY YEARS OF CLAYTON

  
CAUGHT

  
CHESTER

  
A VISITOR

  
CELLO AND RASPUTIN

  
A MEETING IS PLANNED

  
TAKING ON CHARLIE TIMMS

  
PREGNANT AND IN PRISON

  
PONY

  
THE STARBUCKS SHOWDOWN

  
MEETINGS

  
A LETTER FROM BATYA SHULAMIT

  
POSTPARTUM

  
POOKIE IN CRISIS

  
SAM

  
JUDAICA

  
THE MURAL

  
CUSTODY REVISITED

  
THE HONORS COTTAGES

  
PHYLLIS

  
BAT MITZVAH TALK: ANOTHER LETTER TO BATYA SHULAMIT

  
APARTMENT HUNTING

  
WALKING THE DOG

  
ANDROCLES

  
A MYRIAD OF TEMPTATIONS

  
WHAT IS NORMAL?

  
MAURICE

  
AN UNEXPECTED VISITOR

  
THE SAVIOR'S ARM

  
AFTERWORD

  
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  
ALSO BY FEMINIST PRESS

  
ABOUT FEMINIST PRESS

I'm not used to walking on grounds without fences. I don't know what to do with the four corners of open space. And to look up and not see a watchtower? The sky seems infinite and looming. Like it could swallow you. I understand the concept of crating a puppy. Back at Clayton I always used them for training. The dogs knew where freedom began and ended. Life was clear and squared in. There were the bars on the walls. There was the gated door. The door stayed closed unless I opened it. There was the space in the corner where the crate fit, and when a dog was let out, he knew exactly how much space he had to walk. What would my dogs have done with a wide-open road with no gates? Puppies running without boundaries. They might run and run until they exhausted themselves. They might've gone so far from the starting place that they wouldn't know what it meant to return. The vastness of space might fool them too. They could go just a tiny distance and yet feel as if they'd arrived at some gigantic different location. Lost. Afraid. The puppies need their crates.

First, you have to get used to the basic concept of living. And practice the small, safe, familiar moves. You come and go through the recognizable door, hearing the recognizable click both ways. And then, one day, you nose your way onto the
sidewalk or grass. But even then there's a leash holding you. The freedom is exhilarating. The disappearance of gates is terrifying. If you're lucky, when you go too far the owner pulls you back. Or if you're too shy to move, you have an owner to tempt you out of your corner with treats. These first few months out of prison, I could have used one of those retractable leashes. And a treat or two.

THE EARLY DAYS OF FREEDOM

A few days ago I fell down a full flight of stairs inside a loft building on Wooster Street. I was yanked by three Yorkies, each one no bigger than a spare rib: Larry, Moe, and Curly, after the Three Stooges (though Curly is a girl). Their owner, Mr. Arthur, was an overweight, slightly alcoholic lawyer on the verge of losing his job due to downsizing. He had the judgmental snideness of the mean category of drunk. He'd recently separated from his wife, and they had joint custody of the three hairbrush-like dogs. My job was to deliver them from the lawyer's loft to his wife's apartment above Taste of India on Bleecker Street and vice versa. This was because the two weren't speaking to each other. Whenever they had something to communicate, they'd tuck a note under one of the dogs' collars. One note said,
I'm not renewing the fucking fire insurance
. (Of course I read them.) My favorite missive so far:
If you can get your dick out of your assistant's vagina, your son might appreciate a call
. One day I may write a note of my own and fold it under Larry or Moe's collar. Something like,
I've planted a bomb under the bonsai tree and it's going to blow now
. Just to see what it might do. Normally this was an easy twice-a-week job, not like dragging Doorbell, the giant bullmastiff, around a long block. But when I took the fall I was a bit shaken. I couldn't stop. I couldn't go into bandaging
or a cast. It brought on the horrors. What if I'd broken a limb? There'd be no one to sit with me in the ER while I waited for the X-ray. The complexities of freedom were continually being revealed to me. Every day I discovered another way in which I had to catch up.

CLAYTON

I got this job at PetPals through the warden at Clayton Correctional. She was a five-foot cowgirl named Jen Lee. Her voice was a cross between Huddie Ledbetter and Tom Waits. Her chopped gray hair made her seem very butch, though everyone knew she had a husband at one time, and a couple of grown kids could be seen driving in and out of the warden's house when they visited. Jen Lee tried to come off like the new progressive style of warden. She'd have a regular game of dominoes with a group of guards and walk the grounds unarmed. She'd take her strolls up the hill to the ivy-covered houses where the honor prisoners lived (the ones with years of no demerits and plenty of school credits). Then she'd turn toward the big gravel hill and follow the path toward the main facilities. She'd stop at the flat, one-floor “special detention” house for the girls who were just too mean to live with anyone else. Jen Lee liked to spend time with those snakes. She didn't take their shit.

Anyway, back in 2008, she called me into her office. She sat in her long upholstered chair, her toes barely touching the floor. “I got a letter from one of our graduates,” she said. (She calls the ones who get out “graduates.”) She rolled back and forth and sideways in her dark chair, enjoying the ride. “Yeah, one of our girls, Lucinda—you don't know her—is starting
a dog walking service with her useless junkie of a boyfriend. She's a bit of a nutcase, but so are you. And maybe her business has a chance in this bloodsucking economy. She's looking for girls from the Dogs for the Blind program. If you get parole, I'll get you her number!”

I didn't answer her.

I wasn't prepared to dive into a real skilled job. But I didn't challenge authority for no reason. I'd learned the technique from my dogs. Seeming obedience, but instant readiness. “You wanna get outta here, don't you?” Jen Lee asked. She could see the bargaining going on in my brain. “Aren't you doing the good girl thing now? Sewing up your prom dress?” She was suspicious. She grabbed a swizzle stick from a round container of them on her desk and started chewing. She started spitting plastic shards into the air. “I'm going to recommend you to Lucinda,” she said, “regardless.” This was a typical way of her demonstrating her compassionate and liberal sadism. She knew I had PTSD and a pocketbook full of other troubles that could end me up, like so many others, back in the slammer less than a year after parole.

Unlike most of the women at Clayton, I hadn't lived each hour waiting for the morning I'd get out. I guess I'd become somewhat Zen. Or passive. Or suicidal. They said that when you got out of the hospital after a long sickness, the first day you're home pictures, scenes, and faces from the entire stay would flash before your eyes. I didn't know what would happen when my body hit air. Would I fly or incinerate? Jen Lee just watched my brain negotiate between
stay
or
go
. “Everyone's afraid,” she said. It's a hell of a thing to contemplate life starting all over at the age of forty-three. After over twenty-five years of being locked up, how do I untie the strings of knots my life got tied into? Jen Lee dripped her chewed-up swizzle stick into the trash, dug out another, and chewed.

“It's like being born,” she told me. “Only you're aware of it. All that life coming at you. When you've been in a dark room, one blast of light can blind you.”

Jen Lee started searching through her desk. It was covered with dog-eared files, Post-its, and memos. There were key chains and handwritten letters and drawings from different prisoners' kids. She dug down deep in a file drawer and pulled out a pair of ugly, bright-yellow wraparound sunglasses.

“Here,” she said.

I winced, lowered my eyes, and shifted uncomfortably. The color was aggressively phony and the shapes of each eye minutely different enough from the other to distort the wearer's face into a glaring inquisitor.

“These'll make the sun less bright for a few months.” Then she turned back to stern lady warden. “But you gotta keep up with all your therapies, Carleen. The world can't adjust its colors and shapes for a loony tune. You're gonna have to live in all those waiting rooms when you leave here.”

“Absolutely,” I lied. What was she talking about? I carried a life sentence. I wasn't getting parole.