Year of the Dog (6 page)

While I stood taking in this glimpse of him, James put down a towel and a bowl of water in the kitchen for Beulah, turned on a tape of a deep raspy voice singing “I'm Your Man,” telling me we were listening to Leonard Cohen, then changed his mind and turned it off again.

“You want some orange juice?” he asked. “Or a beer or something?”

“Are these for your students?” I asked, gesturing to the elaborate drawings, thinking maybe these were details from famous structures abroad, having to do with cathedrals or mills or some other ancient building they'd be studying. Getting comfortable on the settee and tucking my feet up, I was wondering if maybe all teachers had stuff like this. He didn't seem like any teacher I'd ever had, though maybe I'd have benefited from one like him. Could I imagine Janey Daniels, playing basketball but wishing she was a track star, going into a class taught by a Mr. James Maarten? It would have gone over my head. Though maybe later, in the university, when I'd got serious about learning the specifics of pharmaceuticals easing the discomforts of the body, I might have been curious, attracted, by a course that offered such attention to detail, might even have raised my hand to ask Mr. Maarten, “Why
ash
for wheels? Why
elm
for drums?”

“Sort of, I guess, in a way.” He gave us each a glass of orange juice, frosty cold. A ceiling fan blew a little air; still, it was warm. “I read about this building in Italy, a long time
ago, built like that—.” He leaned back in his desk chair and pointed at the drawings. “A walnut tree cut up for wood screws. That first time I read it, I lay flat on my back and kept reading it aloud because I couldn't believe it. Work like that. I'd just be reading it in my head all the time. You ever do that? The rollers for the hoist were greased with tallow; the ropes were soaked in vinegar. Well, I thought—I take these kids overseas? It's part of the Experiment in International Living, I did it myself after high school—anyway, I thought this impossible building, this dome, was going up, the craftsman was designing it in his head,
in 1428.
So I wanted my kids to know about that, and think about what was happening in The Netherlands at the same time, that's where we go. And compare that with here—he's figuring out chestnut poles for the hoist, and over here in this country at that time, there's nothing like that.” He looked at me, and then had to study his knees, his face flushed with having talked so much.

I tried to imagine reading a book aloud to myself to understand it better. Thinking about him, somebody who'd do that, I decided I hadn't known anybody like this before. I had a hundred questions.

“If you take students in the summer,” I asked, “how come you're here? I mean, I saw you at the Dog Park the first day of June.”

“Yeah,” he said. “We did winter term this year.”

“But when you went, back in high school, it was summer?”

He wiggled a finger in an ear. “Mostly we do summer. It depends on where the kids are going when they graduate. It's different, different years.” He let his eyes roam the room.

How did he get this way, so brainy, so nerdy? “Where was home?” I asked, trying to imagine him growing up.

He gestured around the room. “This is it.”

“I mean—.” Didn't he get it? “Where did you grow up? Did you go off to school, before you went on the study-abroad program?”

He looked at me, scowling. “You didn't start with all that at the park. I liked it that you were doing this stuff with the puppy, knowing you had to give her away. Not a lot of people would do that. You didn't do a third degree.”

“I was just trying to—get to know you.”

“Well, here I am. This is me.”

“I mean where you came from, you know, your family, the town . . .” How could he not understand that? “I mean, it's what you do in the south, you ask all about a person's family and where they grew up and what they did when they were kids. It's being friendly.”

He waved a hand in the air, dismissing my words. “That's how you learn
class cues.
Isn't that what you want? You want to know if I had a rich dad? Do I come from old money, the foreign service, starving artists, film people? That's what you're asking.”

“Jeez, James, you must've been through this before. I mean I'm not the first girl you ever had over.” Though at that moment I wasn't so sure about that. “Everybody asks questions, don't they? You must've come up with something to tell other people.”

“Yeah,” he answered, sitting back down, examining a split thumbnail. “I've been through it. Every single female is an interrogation machine.”

What was his problem, I wondered. What didn't he want to tell? His dad was in the pen? His mom ran a soup kitchen? Did any of that matter? It did, of course it did, but not like he thought. How could you get close to anybody if you didn't talk about all your baggage? Maybe that's why I'd never gone out with this scraggly face-hair type of guy always putting some kind of cap on his head, always having scabs on his knees, always knowing so damn much stuff. How could you get close to somebody who only sprang to life in Algebra IV or across the ocean?

“Beulah needs to chase her ball,” I said, heaving a sigh that
must have filled up his carefully bare room. “She needs to get her exercise.”

At the sound of her name, precious puppy trotted to my side, and I called her a “good girl,” and invited her to “come.”

We walked down the green yard to the waterfront edged in reeds and wild purple flowers. Seagulls yelled with their human screech and flew toward town. I'd brought a yellow tennis ball, having first read every scrap of writing on play toys in the Puppy Manual, in case it warned
Never give a Companion Dog a ball to chase.

“We get winter birds in South Carolina,” I said. “Do you feed the ones that stay?”

“Uh,” James said. “I guess we will, put out birdseed this winter, me and Pete.”

And I held my tongue and didn't ask if this was their first winter here. Instead, I watched Beulah play catch, trotting after the tennis ball as it rolled down the grassy unfenced lawn, bringing it back in her teeth every time I gave her long leash a little tug. She had a fine time; dogs didn't think about the past.
Now
being a yellow ball on a sloping yard;
now
being fetching the ball for your person. James played, too: he lay on his side and rolled all the way to the water's edge with the puppy following along after him, not knowing what to think.
Person on the ground
!

After a bit, he suggested, with the sun slanting low over the mountains across the lake, “We could eat at Irv's. You passed it? When you turned off Pine? Kind of an old diner, with ten kinds of pie. They've got blueberry waffles and sausage from six a.m. to midnight. If you're not some kind of vegetarian?”

“Sure,” I said, resolved to help make it work, my first-ever date with a stranger. “Sounds fine.”

10

EVEN THOUGH I had read the Puppy Manual from cover to cover and knew the traits the Companions were looking for, as well as the unwelcome habits we were to avoid, I didn't feel the least bit of apprehension the morning of our first Puppy Social. In fact, all I could think about was that Precious Dog would meet lots of other puppies about her age, all learning to be trusty affectionate companions to a blind person the same as she was. It was early July, though still cool as spring at home, and I'd brushed and groomed her creamy coat, and readied us both in a haze of almost dizzy anticipation. Putting on her working leash, as we'd been instructed, and packing her umbilical leash in my bag for playtime, I dressed myself in summertime white pants and a red-striped tee.

For the last month, Beulah had been growing into her big padded paws, her little belly had disappeared, and now she opened her eyes wide and stood stock still at the sound of her name, to let me know I had her full attention. For the last month, too, she'd been bravely putting up with her vaccines (for dysentery, paravirus, and rabies), taking her heartworm medication, and then, as a sort of reward for us both, each evening before bedtime flopping down on our rented rug, on which I spread a clean sheet, and letting me feel all around her eyes and mouth, rub her gums, run my fingers between her
toes, and stroke her smooth tummy—a gentle massage that got her used to human touch and got me used to
seeing her,
the way a blind person would,
with my hands.

We were meeting for the Puppy Social at what had once been the Country Day School, a daycare facility for preschoolers, and, driving south, with Beulah on the floor of the front seat where Companion puppies had to ride, I found that the turnoff was a road almost due west of PACIFIC VIEW. As I passed the gas station and then the motel, I slowed down and waved, as if at an old friend, thinking how frantic I'd been while staying there, to find a place to live, to get my puppy. Pacific View, Vermont. That seemed like years ago instead of scarcely two months.

Getting out of my car, letting Beulah have a busy break before we went inside—over in a brushy area which one of the Companions steered us to—I expected everyone to be feeling the way I was, thinking we'd all sort of show off our dogs and say nice things about other people's dogs. But the ones who had been to Puppy Socials before had a different attitude, one that seemed to treat the event as one more hurdle.

We all went inside, putting the loose leashes on our dogs and taking our seats in the small kindergarten-size chairs set in a circle, in a large bright room with red vinyl floors, blue-checked curtains at the low windows, and a poster of giant yellow sunflowers facing the door. The Companion leader, Betty, a woman perhaps in her fifties, with a wonderfully easy way of greeting the puppies as if she'd raised them all, made the introductions—though I didn't get anyone's name at that point, not even the names of the puppies, all of whom were labs except for one golden retriever, for staring all around at what I hoped would be new friends for Beulah and me.

She had us bring our dogs to attention, walk them around the room twice on their loose leashes, very fast the second time around, and then have them sit beside us. Then, being very
friendly and casual, she went over with us why we'd been brought together, explaining it was not only to socialize, although that was the emphasis for today, but so that we could catch at an early stage any of the potential problems which had to be noted and corrected before they became real problems. Flipping through the thick paperback copy of the Puppy Manual, she reminded us to watch for those behaviors which could prevent our puppies from getting to work:
building worry, growing fearful, becoming distracted,
and
soliciting approval.

I guess I only half-listened, being so sure that Beulah was Perfect Dog. But perhaps all new first-time raisers started out with that idea. And I felt relaxed, at least I tried to, while Betty finished her talk, reassuring us that what she was saying would become clearer in time. Moving around the room informally, she had us take off their leashes—and let them loose! What a thrill! The dogs who had done this before seemed to know they could bound around and jump up on each other and roll on the floor and nip and chase each other, but the young puppies like Beulah and Edgar, the golden retriever, had a harder time figuring out how to romp and be rowdy, and they mostly watched.

Betty passed out green tennis balls, yarn balls, and Nylabones, and the older puppies wrestled for them with their teeth and that seemed all right to do and reminded me of the big dogs at the Dog Park. Then, after a while, we called them to our sides and to attention, and Betty announced it was time to trade dogs.

Trade dogs?
I had trouble getting my mind around the idea. How could Beulah understand another person? How could I give commands to another dog? But I went along with it, and received a small, curious black lab named Naomi, who sniffed my shoes and tried to dig her nose into my bag. But I called her name, and told her “down,” slipping a hand under her
front legs and pushing her gently, as we were supposed to do, till she rested on her stomach on the floor. Except that she wriggled away and went off to sniff the far corner, just at the very moment that Beulah came back to me and leaned her warm head against my knee. She had been assigned to a hunky guy whose big yellow lab kept trying to mount every dog that came near it, male or female, so I couldn't exactly blame her for wandering off. But then generally the switching hadn't gone well: a nervous lab larger and paler than Beulah stood frozen to a spot behind her person's chair and wouldn't move; a small black lab across the room puddled on the floor as her male raiser watched, turning red; and Edgar, the golden retriever, went looking for a tennis ball.

Then Betty, in the very chatty, low-key way that I now found terrifying, perched on the edge of a table and pointed out to us that we had wonderful puppies who were bound to be good companions, but they had a way to go. She told the raiser of the big aggressive lab that his dog would have to overcome his mounting problem, since companions were never neutered until after they were selected, in case they were chosen to be breeders. And explained to the person of Naomi, the curious puppy I'd had, that she needed to be taught to focus and attend, and gave her some pointers on avoiding distraction. To the heavy-set man who belonged to the black lab who puddled, she suggested that maybe he left her alone too much, that she was growing fearful—“notice how she tucks her tail under”—and that four hours a day was too long to stay away. She pointed out to the golden retriever's person the flakes on his coat, the
dander,
or dandruff, a telltale sign, she said, that he was building worry. “He needs to get out more, take him with you to your children's schools or to the supermarket.”

All this time I'd been holding my breath. Wanting her to say that Beulah was their prize puppy and to watch how well
she was doing. But, instead, and my face burned hot when I heard it, Betty walked over to me saying, “She's soliciting approval, don't you see? She looks to you for your responses instead of making her own.” And, to demonstrate, she called Beulah's name, at which my puppy turned her gaze in my direction.