The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals

I have observed elsewhere that there is a significant difference between the truth of experience and the facts of everyday life. What I write about in these pages is often emotive, what I experienced, observed, and felt in different parts of my life. Some of the details I’ve forgotten (and occasionally I make note of that in the text, as with the date of a tragic fire in
chapter 3
), and some I’ve remembered, perhaps, imperfectly. So I may not have all the facts in perfect order, but I have no doubt about the truth of these stories.

For Evans Huber

I grew up in a place called the Golden Ghetto, where people sang Hatikvah in the swept streets, celebrating another war won in the homeland. As children we were told our superior Jewish spirit would lift us up, if we were willing to try.
Look around you
, everyone said;
see how wealthy we are?
Back then I believed this, but now I see the story differently. I see rows of modest homes, the interiors often dim, with washed linoleum floors and heavy curtains hanging. On Fridays, at sundown, in the summertime, when the windows were lifted, we could hear sung prayers spooling through the air, the melodies merging with ours as we too blessed our bounty, tearing into the challa’s buttery braid. At the head of the table my father carved a kosher bird cooked in a garland of onions and coins of carrots flashing orange and floating in the broth. When I was eight years old I began to sense that the Golden Ghetto and our supposedly superior Jewish spirit were more wish than fact. I knew, for instance, that I could be kidnapped. I knew every bone was breakable. I put this information in some cut-off corner of my mind. What I wanted was a world I could wade in, some sort of perpetual summer. In such a season—the streets deserted in the heat, sun-drenched and silent—I could follow the path of an ant for hours, crouching on the baking curb while watching the insect zig and zag, the black bead of its body ascending a stem, then dropping into the open cup of a wayward poppy rooted in the cracked concrete.

As I remember it, in those afternoons I was often alone on the street, at the peak of the summer heat, when people drew their blinds so the inside of almost every home was submerged in shadow, as if sunk to the bottom of the sea, the brilliant white light visible only as it seeped between the slatted blinds and spread across the sills like oil. Once the sun set, our neighbors emerged, the children in their pressed shorts, the women sitting on the stoops, a kerchief tied around the curlers in their hair, the husbands dragging the coiled hose from its reel and then the sudden spray drenching the parched ground, puddling on the scorched surface before slowly sinking in. For me, the ghetto’s gardens tell the story of this place, all the hedges trimmed, every flower staked and noosed at its neck. Our streets were spare, with hardly any trees, the town’s Holocaust survivors—and there were many, old and bent-backed—frightened by all that branching, seeing in a single sapling—(quickly yanked from its socket)—the huge forests they’d hid in, escaping Hitler’s grip. In those forests, they said, towering larches had crosshatched the sky, making scraping sounds when the wind blew. The ghetto’s grandparents had seen vipers living in the shadows cast by trees and had known animals with too many teeth use the yews for cover and for camouflage Our ninety-year-old neighbor, Mr. Eller, said he had seen people hung from low branches, their necks snapped in a second, the tongue taking longer to turn blue.

Despite its stark seasons, its steeply silent Sabbaths, its sadness and its fear, the Golden Ghetto was good enough for a child. Some days, when the heat rose so high the black tar melted, we would stamp our hands into the streets, so when you looked out your window you saw your road smattered with palm prints, as if primates had been let loose in the night. On Fridays, Erev Shabbat, we all sang the same songs in synagogue; then we all went home to bless our fruits and eat our ruddy roasts, this kind of neighborhood communing unusual, perhaps priceless, and yet, it left me longing. I never said to myself,
I am longing
; that feeling lived at a level below language, but nevertheless I knew it because of how I saw things, my mother unloading the toppling market bags, pulling out packages of marbled meat, or the charged color of a wet carrot, my mother with her apron on, her blade whisking away the tough skin, the rind coming off in curls and fragrant shavings I collected in my cupped hands, lifting them to my nose and breathing in that wild and rustic tang.

When I was young there was my world and then, as I grew, came thoughts of what was beyond us. At night, radio towers blinked on distant hills. I could hear from the environs of town the gunning of motors, the boom of a backfire. Sometimes late at night or early, early in the morning, when the summer mist lay like milk just above the grass, I heard my mother crying, and when I crept closer, I could see she always pressed a crumpled Kleenex to her mouth. Once she saw me see. She tossed her Kleenex in the trash and walked off, her high heels tapping on our polished floor. I wondered if her crying had to do with where we were, or where we weren’t. I didn’t know. I wasn’t sure. In sleep I sometimes heard, from far away, a lady knocking on a giant door, the door a mighty wedge of wood, her dress frothing around her feet, as snow fell. In the real world, the daytime world, the seasons switched, and the snow fell and fell and refused to stop, despite our expectations. Snow crept over our ground level windows and darkened the house. Snow turned the quotidian into a question mark, so the Ellers’ house next door, a house I’d seen every day of my eight years on earth, suddenly looked utterly unlike itself, fangs of ice hanging off the gutters, a pole snapped in half lying across their drowning roof. School closed for ten days and the roads were all impassable. As the shreds fell from the blank but spilling sky, I saw two policemen ride down our street on huge horses, the horses high stepping in the mounds and drifts. The horses were white and as they melted into the distance it seemed as if the animals became a part of the swirling storm, their massive bodies breaking up into flakes and dancing down the drafts of wind, a sight so beautiful, so foreign, so
impossible
I felt a kind of deep and wild want, but for what I couldn’t say.

And then, just like that, the snow stopped. The sky cleared. Spring came. The clouds shook themselves out and, as if embarrassed by their excess, appeared against their common blue background all fleecy and preened. The winter had been long and wet, and it did something odd to the earth. The earth was juicer and darker than usual, and pink worms were everywhere, wriggling with abandon, their bodies translucent, our science teacher holding one up to the light and showing us the dark sac of the stomach and the small smear of the brain. My birthday came on March 21, the first day of spring, my sign the ram with her white horns in a thicket.

I don’t know if my parents sensed my sensing. My father, for sure, saw my excitement when the police horses had passed through as I, throwing open the second-floor window, my hands thrust out into the blinding white, yelled out the only thing I could think to say in such a situation: “Hey! Hey!” The horses didn’t stop. The snow did. Bulbs, long buried beneath the close-cropped lawns, put forth their serpent skulls. For my birthday that year I got a bike. On its wicker basket were plastic tulips, and the handlebars sported purple and silver streamers, sparkles scattered in the seat. A Schwinn. “A Schwinn!” I shouted out. The bell had a sharp sound, a
brrrrring
, like someone shivering, from excitement or from fear, it wasn’t clear.

I was only nine, but my father worked downtown, his hours long, and my mother was consumed with some rage-filled sadness that became, over days and weeks, like her own little ghetto, its color, in my mind, always changing like the lipsticks she wore, a melancholy mauve, a bitter red, a punch pink; who knew why, or when? I couldn’t understand her and because I couldn’t understand her I couldn’t claim her; she wasn’t mine. The bike was mine. The snow was gone. The neighborhood was safe, so what was there to watch, really? I was just another nine-year-old on a stingray seat, my wicker basket full of dandelions, snapped stems oozing milk. My brother and sisters went one way, I went another, and that was that. At first I rode around the block and then I rode around two blocks and before the week was through I rode beyond the Golden Ghetto, pedaling furiously, wind in my hair, my eyes tearing from the sharp spring air, my chest at once flung open with excitement even as it was compressed with want. Where were those policemen? Was it possible that their horses lived near here? The next town over was almost just like ours, the same red-brick schoolhouse, the same patriotic post office, the same butcher with his fresh cuts hanging on hooks in the window. I rode farther still. I found a barber on a side street, his pole twisted twirls of color, his scissors flashing as he cut the white locks off an old man’s hair. I stopped to see. The barber worked so gently, draping a hank across his palm and then softly snipping, the floor floss-soft with fallings. The barber kept his combs in bowls of sudsy water and the old man, bibbed to his chin, slept with his head lolling in the sunlight pouring through the wall-sized window through which I watched. The barber beckoned me in. I lowered my kickstand and pushed open the door. The spring air still carried the winter’s chill, but in here it was toasty and the old man softly snored. “What’s a girl like you doing without a scarf?” the barber asked, his glasses down on his nose, his eyes a rich blue. “Who’s cold?” I said, although in fact, now that I was in here, I realized that I was. A sudden sleepiness came over me and it occurred to me I could be dreaming this scene, asleep in my bed, the
snap snap
of the scissors suddenly charged with misty meaning, the pouring sunlight infusing the room with the golden color of heaven. I wanted to leave and I wanted to stay at the same time, aware that, real or not, this was a world beyond my own, and anything could happen here. “Your name?” the barber asked, and I said “Lauren,” its sound for some reason all wrong, not mine;
Lauren Lauren Lauren
and a jolt went through me, hard to explain, the sudden awareness that I existed, separate from my surroundings.