Year of the Dog (12 page)

We ate the crumbling buttered biscuits and sipped too-strong tea, while Aunt May stared out the window at the snowy yard where even my boot prints no longer showed. I hadn't really looked at her before, as someone apart from being Mom's aunt, but now I saw the lines around her eyes behind her glasses, the gray bangs grown a bit too long, the face of someone with a lot of stuff going on inside. Would I look like that someday? Tall, composed, and a little bit off somewhere else? She wore a heavy cotton gray dress and sweater, and gray socks with what she called sneakers.

“What's on your mind, that brought you out this morning?”

I didn't know how to ask her, or even how to tell her. So I blurted out the whole of it. “Mom and Daddy are coming to Burlington before Christmas, to see how I'm doing up here.” I let out my breath. Did she understand what I was really saying?

“I see,” she said. Looking off, she sipped her tea and then seemed to study the rug at her feet. “You mother will wish to be invited here.”

“She will,” I said. “She asks all the time if I've, when I've seen you, and if I've met—
him.
” I couldn't look at her.

“And if we disappoint her, she'll have a duck.” She gave a sigh.

I laughed, since that was exactly Mom's term for getting in an uproar. “That's it.”

“When do they plan to come?”

“Ten days before Christmas. They didn't want to miss the actual holidays at home. The church does a lot.”

She nodded. “It will be dark then shortly after four. Let me think. We need someone to dilute family here. Have you perhaps a friend?”

“James. I'm seeing a teacher named James.”

“Just the thing. An ally for Talbot among all the females. That will make six of us. That's civilized. One is obligated to make general conversation with six. We'll do something in front of the fire. I never have a tree; haven't for years. But holly and wreaths, something festive.” She shook her head. “Family.”

“At least, you know, we have one,” I said. “James didn't ever know his.”

“And is he the worse for it?” She shrugged.

“Sure he is. He's had to make himself up, in a way. And I don't know anything about him, not really, because he doesn't know a lot to tell.” I took a breath. “I'm scared about him meeting my folks, to tell the truth. They'll ask him all these nosy questions, the way they do.”

Aunt May studied me a minute. “A word of advice, Janey. Don't pry into your young man's past. Let him be. When you're young, you believe you need to know everything about those you care for, but this is error. Did it help Kitty to know that when my father found me in bed with a friend who was visiting from Vassar, two women without their clothes, he threatened me with my life? Swearing that if he ever found me
doing that again he wouldn't be responsible for himself? Did Kitty need to know that?” She removed her glasses and rubbed her eyes. “Did I need to know that her husband sicced his German shepherd on her when she tried to run away and didn't call him off until she gave in, scars on her legs still? Did I need to lie awake nights imagining that?” She pressed her palms to her knees. “A Rottweiler has moved into the neighborhood. They don't keep him penned. That is the reason I waited on the porch for you when I saw your car.”

“But you wanted to, didn't you, tell each other those things?” My face felt hot to be talking about such personal matters with her.

Aunt May cleaned her glasses and put them back on. “At the time, certainly. Now, I don't know that it was wise. After all these years, I don't know.” She met my eyes.

My tongue felt tied, both by the dreadfulness of the bad events she had shared, and by their echo of events in the mysteries. It seemed almost as if I were reading a new story: a hairdresser noticing bruises on a woman's neck, the judge seeing only one set of tracks in the snow. A woman mauled on her stairs by a dog. Perhaps Aunt May did live with the writer after all, a writer with long skirts and curly gray hair. And I ran the names over in my mind, the same name in two languages:
Greenwood, Boisvert.

Aunt May stood and collected our plates and cups, as if finished with our conversation.

“Thank you,” I said, “for saying Mom and Daddy can come over.”

She stood at the window, looking toward the street and the car. “I'll get your wrap. It's turning colder. Put on your boots and go tend to your puppy.”

22

IT APPEARED IN my mailbox, what I'd been dreading, and could not believe my mom had passed on to me: the birth announcement. Curtis Danforth Prentice, Jr., born November 14.
Danny
they'd call him. Danny Prentice who already would be locating the ability to make a smile to turn girls' heads, the business hanging there between his fat little thighs already prickling with the possibility of the future to come. Looking like his dad. His granddad. Another heartbreaker at 8 pounds 2 ounces. (How could any baby that big have been delivered by Millie Dawson who didn't look like she could carry a sparrow full term? Where had she kept him all those months?)

Mom had tucked the announcement in a lined envelope, accompanied by a real handwritten letter from her, a first.

* * *

Dear Janey,

I'm enclosing what you most likely have no desire at all to see, but you might as well know the news, since everybody else does. Plus I have to thank you for this very pretty stationery with the watercolor of a sailboat on it, which you said was done by one of your friends. Your daddy and I are glad to hear you are making friends up there.

We ran into your old boyfriend Ralph Smalley that you used to go with, at the Southern Fried Café last night. You know he is working at his daddy's dealership in Greenville. He came over and gave a great big greeting to your daddy and I, and let it be known that his own divorce, in case we might not have heard, was in the works.

Just yesterday I ran into Millie Dawson's mom on the street and had to look at a stack of photos as thick as a deck of cards about Curtis Danforth Prentice, Jr., and I'm standing there with one picture of my daughter's DOG in my purse.

Luv u,
Mom

* * *

I couldn't stop looking at the stamp-sized photo stuck on the blue-ribboned card. I couldn't get my mind off the knowledge that hit my chest like a sledge hammer that every baby came with one of these: crisp white birth notice with its blue bow, yellow Pooh bear, tiny snapshot. Or some version, some word sent out about an arrival. Or if not a public announcement, that every baby came with a history like this one: the Prentice boy, the Dawson girl, that poor Daniels girl who had to leave town. That every baby had parents. At least at the start.

By late afternoon, though, walking down the slightly icy front stairs, bundled up in my parka and boots, heading for downtown, I had to get my mind on more immediate matters. Beulah, at eight months, had begun to show signs of going into heat! Pregnancy for female puppies-in-training being the
worst possible scenario. Just as male dogs were not neutered before their selection in case they were chosen as breeders, so female puppies were not spayed until after they had completed their course. Once a gangly adolescent had to turn her attention from her person to the task of birthing, nursing and tending a litter, she had forfeited her chance to be a Companion Dog.

Today, as had been true for the last two weeks, our stroll along Church Street had become a recurrent obstacle course with all male dogs. One in particular this evening, a monster Chow-Chow whose black-tongued mouth opened at the first good sniff of her, started crowding her against the bread kiosk, and instead of tucking her between my knees—after all, you read about the male getting stuck in the female and you can't pull them apart and then the damage is done—I actually hefted her up off the ground in my arms. The Chow-Chow's person, a woman in ski pants (and ear muffs that looked as if they'd been fashioned from Chow-Chow fur) dragged him away, aggrieved. “He's
fixed,
already.”

Naturally, the students with James and Pete had seen the encounter, and had to make something out of it. They reported on a study some Indian doctor, female, had done at The University of Texas involving college students and their t-shirts. It seemed that males could tell when a female ovulated by her smell. And the kids, Cubby, Wolf and Lobo as they were still calling themselves, had already been talking up this idea in their dude voices, making sniffing noises whenever some girl went by, giving thumbs up or down, making growling noises, pawing the sidewalk in their hiking boots. Smart punks. Saying to James, the teacher, “Whaddya say, is that right? You tried it out?” Now, when I'd got myself and my still-virginal girl together and joined them, one of them pointed down the street. “Hey, maybe that stud dog was just checking out Beulah's t-shirt.” Lots of gross-out laughter.

After a beer and a stroll around, we all headed back to James's place: James, Pete, the boys and I. He and Pete had been collecting gear for taking them up into the Green Mountains over Thanksgiving break to teach them real-life first aid tricks. The International Living program liked their students to be emergency-savvy, on the theory that they would not have their parents' insurance cards, family doctor, or even college infirmary to count on. Camping out with new friends in unfamiliar terrain, getting mugged on their rented bikes on the cobblestones, hiking from village to village, they needed to master a crash course in self-sufficiency.

James had got a doctor, he explained to the boys sitting on the floor, shoes off, who specialized in expedition medicine to give him some pointers. In the mode of wilderness leader, he described the makeshift solutions while Pete, his big front teeth chewing earnestly on his lower lip while he held up different items, did the actual demonstrations: how to wash out wounds with sandwich bags (filled with water or snowmelt), how you could sew up wounds with dental floss, how to make a pair of emergency glasses from duct tape (poke dozens of tiny holes with a pin in the tape), how to stop a wound from bleeding with a teabag (it was the tannic acid), how to use a latex glove to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on a stranger, and other stuff that apparently people died from—when mountain climbing, wilderness hiking, or traveling over-seas—because they didn't know.

Fascinating stuff for a pharmacist!

After we finished another beer and everyone devoured the roast pork sandwiches I'd brought, Pete piled Cubby, Wolf and Lobo in his car and took them home.

When we got Beulah settled on her towel on the kitchen floor, I told James, “I had a little news from home.”

“How about we walk on the bike path to the Dog Park?” he suggested, starting in with the job of putting his outdoor
gear back on.

I nodded, pulling on my own sweater, parka, boots, and cap, not having any idea if that curving path out of his neighborhood was safe this late, but not worrying too much about us, mostly glad to leave Beulah locked safely inside where no Chow-Chow could leap from the bushes in the dark and try to mount her.

It actually felt grand to be out in the cold night air, just the two of us, our feet knowing the way down the path and over the bridge, the sound of the creek below us flowing under the ice. No one else was out, and the air smelled of coming snow and chimney smoke. We held gloved hands, and a raw wind stung my face. When we heard what sounded like a gunshot, I stopped dead still and grabbed the bridge railing.

“Most likely some hunter grown numb and dumb,” James said.

“This close to people?”

He moved us along the path to where we could see the white-iced lake. “There's open land not too far, on the next bay. Hunters get all fall, is what it amounts to, deer hunters. Two weeks bow and arrow, couple of weeks off, then two weeks with rifle and two with muzzle-loaders. Sometimes out here you can see a deer, if it's late, running across the park.”

I looked behind me as we sat close together on a bench near the rocks along the water's edge, but the woods were still. “My ex had his baby,” I told James. “A boy.”

He took one of my gloved hands and held it in his warm jacket pocket. After a bit he asked, “So, umm, are you okay with that?”

“The thing is, looking at that announcement which my mom for some reason needed to send me, all I could think was that even if that kid never knew a thing about his dad and me, or ever even knew the story of his dad and Millie, his mom, it doesn't matter. That's his history anyway.”

“Come on, Janey—.”

“James,
everybody had parents.
You had parents, whether you knew them or not.”

He took my hand out of his pocket and gave it back. “Okay, all right.”

I let it go. After a time, when we'd begun to feel the chill in our bones, I put my cheek against his and asked, “You want to go back and sniff my t-shirt?”

23

THE FACT OF family being an off-limits topic with James, and the fact that I'd been trying to forget mine was coming, meant it was after James got back from his Thanksgiving campout with Pete and the boys before I broke down and told him the news.

“In two weeks,” I said. “They'll be here in
two weeks.
”

“I don't know about that,” he said, watching the French-speaking trio at the next table all in fir-trimmed parkas. We were having late afternoon lattes in a sort of European café on Church Street, at a window table, looking out at the bundled-up knees and calves of pedestrians on the sidewalk. Sitting inside had its good points after months of having coffee at the warm-weather tables outside. I liked the sound of the door opening and the swoosh of cold air, and then people taking off their coats or parkas and hanging them on racks, blowing on their hands as if they'd just come into a room with an open fire, instead of a large space filled with plants and crowded tables, two steps down as you entered.