The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals (6 page)

And then I was done. I opened my clenched fist to find shattered shell but … but … that was it. Just shattered shell. Where was the golden goo, the yolk, the embryo or fetus or half-formed winged thing? Where was it? WHERE WAS IT? Not here. I clapped my hands together and the scraps of shell fell from my hands to the carpet, flecks and pieces, all of them dry. The egg, it appeared, had been empty all of this time. Later I’d read at the library that sometimes this happens, when fertilization doesn’t occur or when the developing embryo for some reason ceases to proceed, its genetic code wrongly wired so maybe all that grows is a wing, or in my case a tiny tine that looked to be the beginnings of a beak, and a few white chips that could have been bone. Not all eggs, as it turns out, are good eggs, which I’d already known anyway.

It was a disappointment, of course, but I was surprised, after all this Sturm und Drang, by how little of one it was. Had I, after all, ever really believed in a golden feathered friend? When I’d found the egg I was nine, but that was months ago and now I was nine going on ten. I kept seeing my hands, in my mind, shattering that shell, and I remembered feeling the hot hard urge, and how I kept going, couldn’t stop, believing there was life in there, and able, obviously, to kill it out of pure and cold curiosity, or compulsion, the pulsing movement of my muscles, what I was capable of, her hands, my hands, whose hands? Would I grow up outside the alphabet, a person who did harm, harboring her rage and waxy whiteness? Or, perhaps, it was the other way around, and I’d been the bad egg, somehow infecting her with a wrath that was mine first, from the very beginning, the wrath kicked into existence once my first cell split. The keys lay for a long time on the living room floor, but I picked up the egg shells right away, combing the carpet for every last fleck, trying to come away clean. I tossed the shoebox in the trash and stored the warming light in my closet, way up high. Now my nights were dark again, the only glow from the moon or the streetlamp right outside my window, casting an elongated triangle of light on my floor and flooding one small section of my wall. My hands looked huge in the shadows there. I could flap them like wings, clap them like cymbals, ball them like bombs, bursting five fingered and angry into the air while beneath me, below me, around me, the night pedaled on, the sun punched through, and then the Golden Ghetto hummed away another blunted day.

These were different times. Nowadays, if you go into a hospital for depression or even psychosis, they’ll patch you up with medicines and send you back down the slide into society just as fast as they can. But when my mother went in, it was in the early ’70s, and what the doctors lacked in chemical concoctions they made up for in time, and talk. I don’t remember ever visiting her there, although I do recall going by the building in our car and my father pointing out to us what floor she was on. Four weeks later she came back home, on some medicine that made a difference. Color had returned to her skin and the sooty shadows under her eyes had faded away, replaced with something smooth and almost clear, the veins there visible, tiny tendrils. She went back to doing what she’d done before, like making our lunches and talking to a friend or two on the phone, even laughing now and then, a normal laughter that seemed to set things straight in our jumbled-up house. It’s not like all was well, but much was better. She never talked about Tiny and when his little collar turned up under the couch cushions one day, about two weeks after she’d returned, she held it before her face with a wrinkled brow, reading the small, silver, heart-shaped tag that said
Tiny
with our phone number inscribed beneath it. “Tiny,” she said out loud, her head cocked as if listening to something far, far away, and we all got quiet, not knowing what she knew and afraid that a memory might send her down the slide, back to blackness again.

“Yes, Tiny,” my father said then, his voice brisker and louder than usual, and he leaned forward and plucked the collar from her. “That was all a while ago,” he said, and we nodded, and she looked at us, her four children, and then nodded too. “You,” she said to me, “need a haircut. And your room cleaned up. Now.”

I cleaned up my room,
now
, and two days later she took me for a haircut, instructing the stylist to chop off the curls that came whenever my hair grew out, the floor beneath my feet littered with large locks and maple swirls, the scissors clipping and clipping and my mother saying “more” until, in the end, the floor was a sea of hirsute waves and I looked nearly bald, the hair cut so close to my skull it appeared to be clinging to it, like a cap that might blow away in a brisk wind. While my mother paid I sat in the seat and watched a woman sweep me up, my whole head, it seemed, tossed into the trash and my neck now bare to the breezes outside, so I shivered. Lying in bed that night I could feel the bareness of my neck, feel the palpable shadows flickering and stroking, and it wasn’t until I hunkered down deep in the sheets, a blanket bunched up to my chin, that I could finally fall safely asleep.

We had a snowless winter that year, the ground hard and brown while my nine-going-on-ten body seemed to think it was spring, ripening, the curls she’s tried to cut out of me appearing, as if by magic, in other parts of my body, my waistline changing, my legs growing longer and covered with curly fuzz. Just as the smoothness of the egg had seemed to mock me, my dancing, springy body seemed to mock her, although I never meant it that way. When, I wonder now, had she ceased seeing me as a good egg and started seeing my shape as wrong, as an intended attack? Although the forest was far away there was always an animal between my mother and me; she said she could smell me and insisted I wear deodorant. Her hands strapping me into a bra were invasive, intense, her snout sniffing me out, no matter where I went. The whole thing was hard, over the top, perpetually painful, and yet we seemed to need it, this primitive battle we fought in a moist mythical forest of towering trees and pure white owls and tufts of vivid moss growing in dark delicious hollows; we needed it.

At forty-eight years of age I am five feet tall with hands and feet so petite I can wear my twelve-year-old daughter’s sandals. It always surprises me, to see my feet slip into these narrow flats or to pull child-sized mittens easily over my hands. It shocks me, really, that I’m so small, because in the mythical forest where I’ve lived with my mother for most of my life, I tower and stink, my huge hands ripping trees out by their roots or crushing stumps and eggs, egged on by a barbed need to know. I can’t calculate my ratio of gentleness to cruelty, can’t claim for sure that my teeth aren’t fanged in my mouth. I don’t know where the beast in me begins and the human ends, or what sort of centaur I am. On my good days I feel the animal in me is a sign of strength and speed, a gift to give the daughter who is right now around the age I was then, when this all happened. On my bad days the animal in me becomes a beast and then the beast a burden I’m not sure how to hold, as I go about my business.

For my tenth birthday that March I got a flute, with its lean, long body, my mother insisting I learn to play. She hired a private instructor named Mrs. Rodoway, a tall lady who came to our house twice a week and stood over me turning the pages of the music book on the stand of walnut wood. I’d pick up this gorgeous, complexly keyed instrument with the oval hole for blowing, and I’d blow, trying to curve the air just so, trying to coax melody from this slender shining shape. My first sounds were all squawks and screeches and so loud my face flushed and I’d put the flute down on the ground. “No, no,” Mrs. Rodoway would say, “you can’t give it up like that,” but of course she didn’t understand it wasn’t the flute I wanted to give up; it was me—the self that made the sounds and smashed the silver egg.

I practiced, under my mother’s strict gaze, for thirty minutes every day, and despite the fact that I learned how to keep a whole new kind of time—2/4, 4/4—and despite the fact that I learned to play some Bach and simple songs like “Gay Tarantella,” I couldn’t come to a different image of myself. When June arrived and school let out for the summer, I put the flute away in its velvet-lined case, breaking its body down into three separate segments and laying each piece in the space it was supposed to go, and then closing the case and putting the instrument under my bed, Mrs. Rodoway gone until school started again. Unlike the summer before, when I’d been free to ride as I wished, this summer my mother signed us all up for swimming camp and we got Speedo suits. I hated to swim, hated the cold concrete pool with its narrow lap lines and chemical smell. I had one week off between swimming and school and, with my flute packed away and my Speedo suit folded in my drawer, I took my Schwinn from the hook it hung on in the garage, ratcheted the seat up a notch, and rode off, out of the Golden Ghetto, over the highways where, beneath me, cars streamed by, fast and free; I kept riding and riding until the streets narrowed and the red barns blazed and the cows meandered in the churned-up pastures rich with rotting loam. I didn’t stop for the cows or for a pink drink; I didn’t stop until I reached the Private Way, at which point I leaned my bike up against a tree and, for the first time in almost a year, entered, once more, my forest.

Birds screamed. Creatures flapped past, so close it seemed their feathers brushed my face. The pond, so clear last year, looked brackish and dark now, surrounded on all sides by enormous bump-backed toads. I looked left, then right, stepped here, then there, trying to affirm that, yes, this was the forest I’d so loved and it was, it was,
the same
forest, only this year it scared me whereas last year it had enchanted me.

I could have run, but instead I stayed on the path, vines hanging down, bright berries bleeding on the ground. My feet looked huge to me, my hands hanging from the rims of my wrists downright dangerous. They’d never caught the killer of the girl named Emma Gin—the one taken by a stranger and then found part by part. I’d seen it on TV, here a hand, there a leg, wrapped in a cloth and put into a car. Would my mother, I wondered, love me if I were brought to her like that, in pieces, something she could assemble just as she saw fit? Sometimes, now, a fatigue came over me, so encompassing I couldn’t move. And right then and there the fatigue came down like a cloth covering me, and I sat on the forest ground, my back against a tree. The tree’s roots broke the crust of the earth and tiny white flowers thrived at its base. I picked one of those flowers and, with my fingers, flicked off its head. The sun crossed the treetops and began to descend on the other end of the day. It was 2, then 3, then 4 p.m., the forest edging into night so slowly, just slipping in as one might slowly slip into a cool pool. I, then, entered into stillness again, and as I did I heard the songs of the starlings. Deep in the distance I could make out the moving blur of deer and then, closer by, I saw those holes in the ground, and now I heard the chirps and gurgles of foxes just waking from their naps. I didn’t have any treats and would they even remember me? It appeared they did. First came what I guessed was the large male, climbing out of his hole, and then some slightly smaller ones and then behind them some could-be cubs. Now the male circled the tree, coming closer, the others following him, and then—in a dream I had—came more foxes from more holes, so I was soon surrounded by dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of foxes, all flickering in the late light as they circled me and circled me, and I recalled, then, how once I was a child in an airplane that circled the city for hours while I looked on, my face pressed up against the bubble window, and beneath me the whole world made more beautiful by my distance from it, the cars as tiny as toys, my longing to land growing only larger the more time we were aloft. And so it was with the foxes, inching closer by nearly invisible increments, and I held out my hands so they could see who I was, what I was, and they approved, or so it seemed, because even with no nuts for them they still circled and circled for who knows how many minutes or days or years—this in a dream I had—and then I
click clicked
with my mouth, and all those foxes stopped, turned towards me, sniffing and snuffling, taking in my jumbled scents, for so long, they couldn’t stop, sniffing my palms, my knees, the curves of my calves, sniffing and sniffing and coming back, each time, to my upturned hands, my scrawled lifelines and finding—was it possible?—something sweet.

My daughter, fallen for a horse. My girl, at eight years of age, asking why we can’t take Pegasus home with us, our urban backyard big enough, she claims, for a pasture. This is what horse craze does to a child, stretches the perimeter of the possible.

My daughter, Clara, loves her lessons and all the accoutrements that go with it: bridles and bits, hoof picks and crops and currying combs, jodhpurs with suede patches and long black boots with over one hundred eye hooks, total. My daughter has taken the time to count them and lingers when she laces, her cider-colored hair falling all around her as she leans over, lost in a world I know so well, having been there myself, my own black boots long gone now, by the time I was through the leather so soft it slumped.

My daughter, like me, loves the smell of the stable: dirt floors, wood shavings, wildflowers growing in the cracked corners. My teacher’s name was Rose, and I’ll get to her, but first there’s Amy, Clara’s new instructor, no more than twenty years of age, a ponytail pulled high off her fresh face, her body lean, molded muscles visible when she moves. Each of Clara’s lessons start the same way. With the halter slung over her shoulder, Amy leads my daughter and me to the wire that fences the forty acres of field the horses graze on. If it’s morning there’s mist floating just above the grass in scraps of white; if it’s evening the land looks blue, its hollows filled with shadows.

We three stand by the fence and Amy calls for the horses. She calls for the whole herd, even though Clara will only ride one, and each time I’m tempted to say, “Could I, might I, possibly try riding today, too?” I thought I’d long lost my love, but here it is, as intact as ever, returned to me though my daughter, who now becomes my tether to the past as well as my funnel into the future.