Large Animals in Everyday Life (7 page)

Next door to the child lived an exceedingly large black dog. Half Great Dane, half Rottweiler, half
Clydesdale
, the dog's owner liked to say. He was a fat-cheeked personal injury attorney who advertised on the local TV channel. “An accident is just that—an accident,” he said on his commercial. One would have thought the child would have been scared of the dog, but she wasn't. She was worried about the dog. The dog lived in a chain-link fenced enclosure that gave it plenty of room to run, but it didn't run much. It stood dead-still, right up next to the fence on the side of its enclosure that bordered the child's yard, its boulder-sized head pointed at the child's back door. If someone stepped outside, the dog began to tremble, and then, if the person
took one more step toward the enclosure, the dog hurled itself into the air, releasing a heartbreaking bark so loud and deep it was difficult to comprehend. The dog was lonely! The child visited the dog often, poking her fingers through the chain-link grid to pet the animal. The dog would turn sideways, shivering with desire, and when her fingers touched its side it would shut its eyes, a cracking noise seeming to come from deep within it. The child could not stand to hear the noise. And the fence drove her crazy—she could only squeeze four fingers through and then she could barely move her hand at all. The dog barked and shivered and hurled itself about, desperate for her, and she pushed her fingers through and moved them dutifully back and forth in a spot the size of a baseball card. The dog was so big, and she could touch so little of it!

Her parents gave each other knowing looks when they saw the child doing this. The child was going to ask for a dog. They were good parents and they could see it coming. They were better parents than a lot of parents. There was a boy in the child's second-grade class whose mother whipped him with a Hot Wheels racetrack, for instance. It was common knowledge. And the three Logan children could be seen any Sunday morning picking Japanese beetles from the trees in their yard and dropping them into Chase & Sanborn coffee cans of gasoline, their father grimly supervising from behind the picture window, his arms folded. The child's parents would never do anything like that. When it was time, they would get the child a dog and the dog would teach the child valuable skills while helping her get over her fears.

Actually, though, the child didn't want a dog. What she wanted more than anything was an invisible-dog leash. The leash looked like a regular leash but extended magically out into the air by itself and hung there as though an invisible dog were on it, the dog's neck filling out the open “O” of the collar. The leash was red, or at least all the ones the child had seen were red. The child asked for one for Christmas every year but she never got one. It
was just plain stupid, her parents said, not even funny. It was not even clever.

She thought she could make one herself, maybe. She had a choice: Either find a way to make rope stiff or make something already stiff, such as a stick or pole, look like rope. Of course she had no rope, but her mother kept in the linen closet a skein of thick red yarn from which she cut lengths to tie off the child's pigtails. The child unwound the yarn and glued it to a yardstick, but the yardstick was too stiff and did not by any stretch of the imagination appear to hang, so she removed the yarn and coated it with Elmer's glue and lay it on the lawn to dry. But she hadn't bargained on the yarn just soaking up the glue the way it did. It just drank it up, like it was doing it on purpose. The child began to get irritated. The yarn was not getting stiff at all. It got soggy, then rubbery, then gray from her touching it, with grass blades stuck along its underside.

The big dog had watched her in its usual way when she first came outside, but after a while it went to sleep, lying flat with its big head resting on its front paws, still pointed right at her. She noticed this about the same time she gave up and sat back on her heels, surrounded by the horrid, ruined yarn. The dog went on sleeping, oblivious. Seeing this, she was angry, and then, a moment later, a little panicky.

• • •

The passionate grandmother had a secret. Obviously, she wasn't very good at keeping her feelings to herself, but there was one thing she had not revealed to anybody, had not allowed even herself to acknowledge. Well, she had acknowledged it, but she would not turn and greet it, for that would imply recognition. She knew once she recognized it she was done for. That was the kind of secret it was. It concerned her own demise, lying in wait for her, hidden somewhere in her future. It concerned the cause of her demise, harbored invisibly within her even now, somewhere
deep within her body's connective tissue. She kept this secret not for her own sake but for the sake of the child.

“How old are you?” the child often asked her. The passionate grandmother was a little vain. Not a lot, but somewhat vain.
Oh, I was never what you would call beautiful
, she sometimes said,
but I knew how to walk into a room
.

“I'm as old as my tongue, and a little older than my teeth,” she told the child.

The child loved this. “How old?” she would demand, leaping excitedly around in her grandmother's face.

But the passionate grandmother always said the same thing. The child usually kept on for a while and then eventually gave up. Then the two of them would sit smiling at each other in silence, each worried in her own way but still smiling at the other, at all that could not be understood about the other.

• • •

Christmas is coming and there is much discussion over what to get for the child. The child's parents discuss the issue in their bedroom with their door shut; the grandmothers discuss it in the Chevy Nova on their way to and from the child's house. The parents discuss it with the grandmothers on the telephone, abruptly falling silent when the child skips or sidles by. A puppy is not yet warranted, it is decided, so the child's father begins construction on a dollhouse in his utility room, trying to hammer softly after the child has gone to bed. He has everything he needs: clean blond sheets of pine, glass cut to fit the windows, carpet samples to lay on the floors. It will be a three-story townhouse with an attic, two staircases, and balconies with flower boxes and real wrought-iron railings. The child's father has never known quite what to make of the child's fears, but he sure knows how to make a dollhouse.

The child's mother shops for fabrics with unusual and whimsical designs to use for the dollhouse's curtains, bedspreads, towels,
tablecloths, and wallpaper. She takes the child along on several of these excursions, her manner breezy and matter-of-fact as usual, and as usual the child prowls around the store by herself, returning to her mother's side only to beg her to hurry up so they can leave. The child's mother enjoys the deception. She will tell the child after the surprise, of course; that's half the fun. The child will demand to know on which shopping trip the fabric buying took place, and she will warn the child to pay closer attention in the future, not to be so trusting.

The child has asked again for an invisible-dog leash, and this year it looks like she might get one, from the blasé grandmother. “That sounds like a cute idea,” the blasé grandmother says, when the child excitedly explains it to her. “See how long she likes it once she gets it,” the child's mother says, but the blasé grandmother shrugs. The child is only a child, after all.

The passionate grandmother is the only one who can't figure out what to get. “She's made a list, I'll be happy to give you her list,” the child's mother tells her, barely managing to conceal her exasperation. She has told the passionate grandmother this at least a half dozen times already.

“I believe in spontaneous gift-giving,” the passionate grandmother says, not without exasperation herself. Whoever dreamed up lists?

“Well, you're on your own, then,” the child's mother says. “I mean, your guess is as good as mine,” she adds, feeling a little guilty. But that's ridiculous, why should she feel guilty? After what the woman once called her, right to her face …

The passionate grandmother lies awake at night, wondering. The question seems somehow more pressing than it was in past years. She has been thinking about it for months, actually since long before they started up with their lists, their secrets, their smirks and whispered conversations. Items pass before her open eyes in the dark—balls, board games, sweater sets, easels—all unacceptable. As if to compensate in advance for what will turn
out to be an inadequate gift, she has begun telling the child certain things, truths, more or less. “The ugly is of course more compelling than the pretty,” she tells her, for example, “although the pretty certainly enjoys its day.” Another time she tells her: “Love is more reliable than many an actuality.” Still another time she says, “Robert Dole is evil.” She doesn't know where these statements come from; a context is never suggested. They simply arrive in her head, and so she speaks them.

The child, for her part, seems unfazed. She listens, stretching and unstretching her Chinese jump rope, asking questions as automatically as ever. “Only in loss can one find salvation,” the passionate grandmother tells her, and the child asks what salvation is. The passionate grandmother suddenly recalls the days right after her husband's death, the strange, hollow days with her own child nearly grown, but before this child. This child sits Indian-style, waiting for her answer, hugging herself—but her little freckled arms are so skinny, the passionate grandmother notes with alarm, so frail-looking, so inadequate to the task! She has to turn away.

The father comes home early from work one afternoon a few days before Christmas to put the last touches on the doll-house, and the mother takes the child to see a behavior specialist to get her out of the way. The specialist is a kind-faced, rather sloppy man named Dr. Boonstra. His shirts are always stained in odd places, his nose shiny as a teenager's, but he comes recommended by the child's elementary school. He has met several times already with the child and the child's parents, though it remains to be seen whether he will have any success in exterminating the child's fears. And why
can't
it be as simple as calling the exterminator? the child's mother wonders.

This time Dr. Boonstra talks with the child alone. He ushers her into his warm, messy office and shows her a series of pictures, realistic black line drawings on white cardboard cards. Each drawing represents a familiar object, Dr. Boonstra explains, something
the child might expect to see around the house every day, such as a toaster or a bicycle or a turtleneck sweater. But each object is missing one of its parts, a crucial part, and it will be the child's task to figure out what. The bicycle, for instance, is missing its handlebars. Does the child understand? What is missing is more important than what is there. Dr. Boonstra leans forward, resting his elbows on his knees so that his hands will be steady holding the cards before the child's eyes.

The child proceeds eagerly through the stack, feeling satisfaction each time she correctly identifies what is absent. She is successful with the lamp, bucket, rolling pin, and TV set, but she gets stuck on the scissors. She cannot find anything missing from the scissors. The second blade? No, the scissors are closed. The screw? No, the screw is right there. Another screw? No, there is only one screw. “Nothing's missing!” the child guesses—it's a trick! But no, something is definitely missing, Dr. Boonstra says.

She looks more closely at the picture, Dr. Boonstra tilting it helpfully toward the light. “The paper?” she asks. No, there is no paper, only the scissors. “The screw?” she asks again, weakly. Dr. Boonstra's face is friendly but serious. She has all the time in the world. She puts her face right up next to the card and stares as hard as she can, gritting her teeth and holding her breath, as though if she can just focus hard enough she will be able to see what is invisible. “
Nothing's
missing!” she blurts out, finally. She is getting angry.
What is missing is more important than what is there
, Dr. Boonstra reminds her. She goes on making the same guesses over and over, until finally she is bored. She doesn't care anymore, she is positive nothing is missing. Dr. Boonstra never does tell her the correct answer.

“What did you do today?” the child's mother asks him, writing out his check at the end of the hour.

Dr. Boonstra is famously vague. “Oh, a little of this, a little of that,” he says. The child's mother is not thrilled about these responses but she understands the notion of professionalism, at least.
Dr. Boonstra nods as politely as he can at the mother and notes that the child appears slightly fiercer than she was last week. And last week slightly more so than the week before.
Everything in its time
, he thinks. “Take her home and love her!” he calls after them in the parking lot, waving at the child, who waves back.

“You know what my mother would call a man like that?” the child's mother says, reaching over the front seat to make sure the child's belt is fastened safely. “Tooty-fruity.” The child giggles, imagining the blasé grandmother saying this. The child's mother laughs with her, and they drive along like that, giggling together from their places in the front and back seats.

That night, in the middle of the night, the passionate grandmother awakens. It is not yet Christmas, but almost. She still hasn't found a gift for the child, but that isn't what woke her, not this time. It was something else. Something has changed. She thought she heard music, but there is no music. She was having a dream, maybe that's what it was. Her little bedroom is quiet and blue-gray, as usual, her sheets still tucked neatly into the corners of her little twin bed, holding her snugly in place. But something has changed. She lies there warily, trying to remember her dream.

What comes to mind instead is her son, who as a child always awoke from his dreams bewildered or heartbroken. “There's a canoe in my bed!” he'd exclaimed to her one time, nearly weeping with excitement. “Oh, where are you going?” she had asked, keeping her voice casual. He seemed taken aback by this, and after a moment he told her he didn't know. “Well, are you happy?” she asked him gently. “Yes,” he'd said, and then he looked relieved, and she herself had nearly wept with relief, tucking him back in. And what was it her husband always said, when she returned to their bed? He had not approved.
You are not making it any better for him, always being there
, he would say. What do you know about it? she would argue, and he would roll
over to his side of the bed, saying,
Fine, have it your way, but only in your absence will he learn
. Only in your absence …