Year of the Dog (11 page)

“I told you about the study-abroad program.” He located a frown.

“You did,” I agreed. Slipping Beulah's leash around his wrist, I threw myself again and again into the mound of leaves under the hardwoods above the lake at the Dog Park.

When the shadows made it too cold, we walked her and the bike back along the path to James's place, where I'd left my car in front of his house, which I could still do, though in another month or so there'd be only off-street parking so the snowplow could come through.

“Do you want to drive with me to drop her off?” I asked him. Trying to make it sound casual, that I had arranged to leave my companion for a sleepover with Sylvia and spend the
night at his place, in his bedroom which I'd never seen.

“Uh, sure, I'll ride upfront with her.” He looked nervous, as if he'd agreed to something that scared him to death and it was too late to back out.

“James,” I reminded him, “we decided to do this.”

“Right,” he said. Stopping on the sidewalk dead still, he pulled his knit cap down over his eyes, till it covered his nose. Then he took off the cap and put it on his fist, making a puppet face, having it ask, “Can I handle this?”

I laughed, but felt terrified enough myself without his help. Having sex with somebody new, for the first time, single? Mind numbing. All I knew I'd learned from or with Curtis. And I didn't want to think about that, about what he had liked, my ex, what turned him on, what he liked me to do and say. The point being I didn't want him there, Curtis Prentice, in this nice man's bed. I just wanted me there.

But I'd decided that we had to take a stab at the sex stuff or else, if we waited too long, we'd turn into buddies. James's pals: Pete and Janey. And I wanted us to do better than that. I wanted him to take off his clothes and to open his bedroom door to me. He didn't need to give me his whole life story, but if he couldn't expose his actual
self
to my gaze and my touch, then I'd better find that out before I got too tied up with him.

So in the late afternoon's slanted New England light, we drove Beulah south of town to her doggy overnight, going slowly along the two-lane state road that led us high above the lake so that we could see the changing colors of the distant mountains, and, close at hand, the blazing red and yellow maples and scarlet oaks. Maybe October was the most beautiful month of the year everywhere, I thought. We didn't have leaves turning like this in Peachland, too great a distance from the Blue Ridge, but, even so, back home in Carolina at this time the sun always seemed the color of butterscotch and you could smell bonfires and think about pullover sweaters and
football and getting outside for a walk.

“I could fix us something to eat,” James said in the car, after we'd left Beulah playing with Edgar, and I'd given Sylvia a special thank-you squeeze, hoping another dog wouldn't make too much trouble for her at home. “Stew? I can do stew. We could eat out back in the yard and watch the sun go down.” He was looking out the window where he could already see the flame-red globe sinking from sight. He was casting about. I could see him wipe his sweaty palms on his jeans.

“Let's eat at Irv's,” I said. “My treat.” Feeling as nervous as he looked.

“Waffles and sausage?”

“James. Does it matter?”

“I'm sort of having a panic attack, about tonight?” His voice rose.

“I noticed.” I reached my hand over and found his knee, keeping my other hand on the wheel. “I don't care what we eat for supper, do you?”

“I might not can—you know, at my place.”

“Hey,” I said, “I could have asked you over to wrestle my sofa into a bed. Then we could have thrown our backs out and made a lot of noise and had a fight.”

“Yeah, but you made fried, chicken and cornbread at your place. I thought I ought to come up with something.” He turned in my direction, but I had to give my attention to wheeling into Irv's diner without being rear-ended by the car behind us.

But I guess he was right about fortifying ourselves, because after a good plate of country food, we calmed down and held hands driving under the over pass, up the road that wanted to plunge into the lake, until I pulled to a stop in front of his house. I gave him a kiss, turned off the engine, and we went inside.

To, naturally, find Pete waiting for us in the living room.

Holding three longneck beer bottles in one hand, waving the other, his face beaming, he called out, “Hey, hey, people.” And gave us the good news: the International Living Center had got an anonymous donation for nearly two million, to help high school students spend their summers in a total living experience abroad. Then they had to talk about that, the teachers—James taking off his cap, Pete running a pudgy hand through his buzz-cut hair, as if the better to air their brains. After they'd considered all the options involved in guessing how much of the funds
their
school might hope for, Pete showed us a new flyer he'd made up, listing which languages the Vermont Foreign Language Bank had translators for:

Arabic, Bengali, Mandarin Chinese, Danish, Dutch,

Finnish, French, German, Greek, Gujurati, Hebrew,

Hindi, Hungarian, Llongo, Indonesian, Italian,

Japanese, Konkani . . .

Then when they'd finished their celebrating and their beers, Pete took a look in my direction, wiggled his hand in a wave, and started edging out the back door, suddenly remembering he had some stuff that needed doing.

“Uh,” James said when we were alone, as if he'd lost his train of thought.

I stood face to face with him. “You know I have never even seen your bedroom.”

“Well, hey, the only reason I saw yours is you don't have one.”

“Thanks.”

He decided we needed glasses of water. Draining his, he wrapped an arm around his head, investigated an itch in his ear, took off his glasses to check for smears. “I'm slightly a wreck,” he said.

“I noticed.”

“We could go to your place?”

“We're here.” I'd put on brand new red panties. I'd worn my only good bra. I'd washed and creamed myself like I was doing a nudie movie. The longer we stood around like this, the worse it was going to get. Did he fret about having or not having a rubber? Should I remind him I was a pharmacist and not to worry? “Are we going in there?”

He stood still for maybe ten beats, and then, suddenly grinning and striding across the polished floorboards, he flung open the closed door. “Take a tour. Be amazed. Be disappointed.”

It didn't look the way I'd imagined, that was true. On the floor he had a thin mattress with gray sheets and a white down comforter. On the white wall facing us he had a careful scale-drawing labeled DOME, and one small framed photo of a woman. No stacks of shoes, no old baseballs, basketballs or footballs. No girlie or band posters. No CDs or tapes or old vinyls in sight. A shelf along the front wall on the street side held a humongous computer complex which would have made Michael Dell proud. That was his private room.

I put my arms around his chest, feeling his heart scudding rapidly behind the ribcage. He held me like that a minute, and then went over and closed the door, and, suddenly happy, looking as if some switch in his head had said, It's okay, he began to pull the sweater over my shoulders, at the same time gnawing around on my neck.

Relaxing some, letting out a whole lot of air from more or less holding my breath, I bit his lip, found his tongue, and then cooperated in getting us out of our clothes. The room had some faint light from the street, and, somehow, we got the right things in the right places and remembered how it all went, two people doing that fine familiar thing together. And if we didn't move the Green Mountains on their bedrock, at
least we made the moon rise over PACIFIC VIEW.

Pleased with ourselves, we lay on our backs, nuzzling feet and touching shoulders. Relieved, not wanting to move, I turned to him and smiled, tracing my finger along his lips.

Taking my hand, he gestured to the photograph on the wall. “That's the woman who raised me,” he said. “She died and took my history with her.”

21

I COULDN'T GET enough of the snow. I'd been waking early, sitting up in bed, with it now daylight at six-thirty, though that meant it had started to grow dark by four-thirty, sunsets streaking what seemed a mid-afternoon sky, every day losing a minute or two more of daylight as we rushed toward December's winter solstice. Not sure how I felt about the fact that by the time the days grew as long as the nights were now, I'd be back home in Carolina.

This morning, I took a cup of coffee and sat on the outside steps in the first slanted morning light, wrapped in a robe over my sweater, with Beulah beside me, big dog who liked to sit outdoors with her person. The locust leaves had fallen, scattered, been covered in white, and the dark branches now held a pair of crows from the maple next door. (A bad fortnight for them; the paper mentioned it was crow season for hunters. To some people everything was game.) The bare limbs of the lilac swarmed with sparrows all moving at once until it seemed alive, a bird-bush. And since I'd put out a pie tin filled with wild bird food—
nourriture pour oiseaux sauvages
it said on the Blue Seal feed sack—the songbirds had also come.

Above us, on the second floor, the hoody tenants, Larry and the other one, Roland, were sleeping off the night before, or so I imagined them, flat on their backs, mouths wide open,
huge snorting noises, foul-smelling breath coming out in jerky gusts. When they came clambering down, all they'd see back here would be the snow and our vehicles, off the street, all in a row in the wide rental drive. The birds, the dog and I would have moved on as the sun rose in the sky.

The thing was, I had to talk to Aunt May about the matter of my folks coming to town. I'd put it off for weeks, the same way I'd kept not dealing with the fact myself that they were really going to be here. I didn't have the nerve to call her ahead, terrified that she'd say this didn't happen to be a good day, perhaps we could make it later, perhaps
after the holidays.
On the other hand, to show up at her door the way I'd done that first time when I hadn't minded my manners, and throw myself on her begging for help, didn't seem like a great idea either.

So it turned out to be nearly eleven by the time the snow crunched under my hiking boots in Aunt May's yard, a sack with two warm big biscuits in my hand. I left Beulah curled up on a blanket on the floor of the car, a big dog who knew to wait and not get up on the seat or bark out the window, or get scared when left alone. I'd already taken her for a walk downtown, to show her how to deal with ice-slick sidewalks. But then that wasn't really progress, because it was still
me
taking
her
on the walk, still me letting her know when her feet slipped a bit and she regained her balance, that she was a “good girl,” that she was doing fine. Instead, I knew that I should be teaching her to worry about
my
feet—that is, her blind person's feet—and to be the one to navigate the treacherous sidewalks and noisy traffic on her own.

“Good morning, Janey, this is unexpected,” Aunt May said from the front steps, the door open behind her. “Look there,” she said, in a friendly tone, “you've made the first tracks on the snow.” She considered, frowning. “The boy who brings us the paper must have come hours ago then, before the last
flurry. Certainly he must.” She looked past me at my trail from the car.

I handed her the still warm buttermilk biscuits from Plum's. “I didn't make these,” I admitted, “but they taste like home to me.”

“Come in. I'll fix us tea. I should have built a fire on a day like this. I bring the logs in and then—but who builds a fire in the morning now that our homes have central heat. Here, now, shouldn't you take off your shoes? And let me hang up your wrap.”

“I meant to call first,” I confessed, wanting her to know I knew better than to show up at the door, interrupting her morning. “But I got cold feet.”

She looked down at my heavy socks and smiled. “About what, Janey?”

“I need some help.”

“Let's put these on a plate,” she offered, taking my biscuits and heading for the kitchen, with me trailing behind.

From upstairs, I heard a door close and the light sound of feet retreating across a room. I flushed, realizing that I had barged in without giving Kitty a moment's thought. Then I saw, on the dining table, a newspaper article from the
New York Times
spread out, and copies of articles from the web, all reporting on a woman who had been chewed to death on the stairway of her apartment building by a pair of dogs.

“How horrible,” I said to Aunt May, following her into the kitchen. I could not bear to imagine bad dogs in a world which contained Beulah. How could I ever protect her? How would she be able to protect her blind person?

“Yes, it is devastating.”

“Will this—do you think?—go into one of the mysteries?” And instantly felt ashamed, to be asking such a thing.

She considered for a moment. “I have no doubt it will alter the story in some way. Exactly how—.” She set out two cups
on a tray, and I saw, relieved, that it would be just us.

I read an item from the local paper, pinned to the corkboard, quoting an expert on wife-abuse:

Hairstylists are on the front lines, they're the ones who see the bruises in the course of their daily work and they're the ones who can point people in the proper direction to get help.

“Here, now,” Aunt May said. “Let's take our hot biscuits and jam into the front room.” She looked toward the bay window. “Did you leave your dog in the car, Janey?”

“I did. But she's fine. She has a blanket.”

“You can keep an eye on her from here.”

“Thanks,” I said, surprised at her interest.