Authors: Francine Prose
“That’s what kind of dog it is,” young Joshua explains. “It doesn’t have a voice, it can’t bark.”
The two cops do double takes and look at each other: how could anyone
do
that to a dog?
“They’re born that way,” little Megan pipes up. “They’re
all
born that way.”
“Great watch dogs, huh?” says the Terry Blankett cop, chuckling at his own humor. He knows it’s a tad mean under the circumstances, but seems to feel the Greens deserve it for feeding and housing an overbred, parasitical dog that can’t even do a dog’s job.
Vera’s been shying away from the dog ever since it came in; she, too, thinks it’s a freak. At the same time she’s filled with the strangest desire to move mountains in its defense. Like some canine-loving Clarence Darrow, she’ll rivet the jury with tales of nights on the African veldt, packs of silent Basenjis streaking beside the Masai, trusted not to cry out in the heat of the chase and warn their prey. The Greens will ask her how she knows all this, and she’ll say, “I work next door to the American Basenji Society! What a coincidence!” Another meaningful cross-connection that may, with luck, prepare the way for what’s next.
But if she says that, the cops will say, “Next door where?” Then the whole story will emerge, revealing her—and not the burglars—as the true culprit. Better to pretend she’s the upholsterer, or the gardener, or better yet, the caterer, her purse full of sample quail’s eggs and kiwi fruit for nouvelle cuisine cocktail hours.
“Don’t kid yourself,” says Martin Green. “Ibo’s pretty tough. Silent but deadly. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he gave those sonofabitches the shock of their lives…”
Some way for a doctor to talk. Any minute now someone’s going to tell that story about the Doberman that dropped dead after a break-in, choked on a human finger. A few years ago you heard it everywhere; everyone claimed to know someone who knew someone who’d seen it.
“Let’s take another look,” says the handsome cop, and the phone rings again. “Busy busy,” says gap-tooth.
Vera knows what the calls are about. Why haven’t the Greens changed their number? Stephanie goes into the kitchen to answer, and the two policemen follow. Vera’s so dazzled by the profusion of
things
—fish poachers, paella pans, woks, crocks, food processors with funnels and smokestacks and pistons like sets from
Metropolis
—she’s slow to notice what everyone’s looking at: dusty footprints leading from the missing door across the dark green linoleum to the sink and back out.
“Perfect,” says the Italian cop, and it is. Perfect that the lawn should have turned to dust and that the linoleum is the perfect color to show it. Perfect that Stephanie’s house is so perfectly clean. The footprints themselves are perfect—sharp as footprints in children’s cartoons, as those tracks that lead the Pink Panther to the villain’s lair.
“Perfect,” the cop repeats. “They’re like the guy leaving his name and address and home phone.” But if that’s so, why aren’t they dusting and tracing and measuring, performing those painstaking rituals TV detectives go through? They’re not even bending down. If this is the guy’s number, they might as well crumple and toss it in one of those kitchen-drawer graveyards where phone numbers disappear.
Hanging up the phone, Stephanie shudders visibly, reaches out, and hugs the children close. Despite everything, Vera’s moved. These aren’t footprints in a cartoon—they’re in this woman’s kitchen. How awful to come home and find evidence of some stranger’s filthy feet on your clean linoleum floor!
The prints go from door to sink, sink to door. The Greens and the cops and Vera keep looking back and forth, as if the tracks were the feet that made them, still moving.
“I don’t know,” says the younger cop. “Seems like an awful lot of trouble for a lousy glass of water.”
And then Vera sees what she should have seen all along. Whoever broke in was some larcenous Ponce de Leon in search of the main ingredient in fountain-of-youth lemonade. The only thing she can’t figure out is why the Greens haven’t told the cops about her article or that the neighbors believe the key to health and happiness can be theirs for five cents a glass. You’d think such facts would be key clues in
any
investigation! Perhaps they’re just sick of the story. Vera can sympathize with that. Maybe they’re afraid of losing the cops’ good opinion, afraid this holy-water business will make
them
look like a bunch of religious nuts. But anyone could see that’s not true. Has some lawyer enjoined them to keep quiet?
Here’s the likeliest explanation: There’s no reason to go into it. Because finally, they’re not interested in seeing the water thief brought to justice. They know who the real thief is:
This Week
. By calling the cops, they’re just registering one more grievance, strengthening their case. Upping the legal ante. A million? Why not make it two?
The older cop raises his thumb and aims his index finger at the missing door. “How’s your insurance?” he asks.
“Top of the line,” says Martin Green. “You think I’d be this calm if I wasn’t covered?”
“Well, then,” says the cop. “I know it’s a lousy thing to come home to. But I wouldn’t worry. Looks to me like kid stuff. Mischief. Saturday night, kids get bored, have a couple beers, dare each other to break in, drink a glass of water, get out. Anyone else would at least grab the TV. It won’t happen again, I can practically guarantee it. Certainly not while you’re here. But look, if it’d put your minds at ease, I’ll tell you what. How often you think the guys drive by here, John?”
“Gee, Angelo,” says John. “Once an hour, maybe?”
“All right, look,” says Angelo. “I’ll ask the guys in the patrol car if they’d mind rerouting a little, drive by here every half hour or so for the next couple weeks. How’s that?”
“Thank you,” says Stephanie. “We’d appreciate it.”
“Sure,” says John. “I know how you feel, I got kids myself. Seven of ’em.”
There’s a moment of silence, and then little Megan says, “Seven! Holy shit!”
“Megan!” says Stephanie, but she’s laughing, the cops are laughing, even Martin’s laughing; the kids are giggling hysterically as they walk the cops to the front door and wave while they get in their car. It’s all so chuckly and convivial, it
is
like the coda of a Roy Rogers show, only where are the newborn puppies? Suddenly Vera doesn’t want them to leave; she feels like some thriller victim whose captors have just managed to send the cops away, convinced nothing’s wrong. Now the police are gone, all that camaraderie gone with them; and Vera’s alone with the Greens.
Vera’s so busy looking at everything but the Greens, anyone walking in would think she
was
the upholsterer, checking the art and the furniture with an eye toward a suitable match. There must be a name for this style, she thinks—polished wood, exposed brick, fine Oriental rugs, good furniture, a dot-printed velvet couch. The pile on the Persian carpet is so thick she could lose her mind in it, and all at once she remembers: the party Louise went to dressed as garbage was in a house like this. When Louise tossed her play trash on the rug, the hostess brought out a vacuum, though the room was full of masked revelers and the hostess was dressed—in a trampy pilgrim getup with a giant red cardboard A—as Hester Prynne. The painting above the Greens’ couch is an original that must have set the doctor back a couple of triple bypasses, by that painter whose name Vera forgets: an American flag, half-erased. She’s always valued his work, not for its artistic but for its instructive value. Once when Rosie came home in tears because her second-grade teacher scolded her for spoiling her papers with too much rubbing out, Vera marched her to the museum and stood her in front of a similar picture and told her it was worth twice what her teacher made in a year.
Once more the phone rings. “You answer it,” Martin tells Vera in a tone which makes Vera go and answer it.
“Hello?” Vera says.
“Hello?” says a voice so quavering and cracked it sounds like an imitation old person, a kid disguising his voice. The voice has no sex, only age and illness as it spins out its history of degeneration, operations, masses, lesions, organs repaired and removed and given up on, death sentences and reprieves. No frightening detail of the body’s mutiny is omitted, yet the telling has the weary, oddly mechanical quality of business calls requiring one to repeat the same story again and again until the right person comes on the line. “One drop,” the voice says, thinning now to a not-quite-human scratch, like the dry cry of certain newborns. “Water’s free…Anything’s worth a try…send my boy…”
“I’m sorry,” Vera says. “It’s all a mistake, it’s not true.” How tempting to confess everything to this anonymous, ancient voice: Believe me, I wrote it, I
know
it’s a lie. Except that this caller has even more at stake than the Greens—and less desire to believe her. How tempting just to hang up. But Vera can’t, no more than she can stop thinking she’s getting what she deserves. The voice knows how selfish she is, asks, “What would it cost you, what?”
By the time Vera hangs up and goes into the living room, she’s so upset she’s yelling at the Greens. Why
don’t
they get an unlisted number? An answering service at least!
The Greens are perched on the edge of their couch, side by side and so wrought-up they could be two teens she’s just interrupted necking. The children are gone—bribed to stay in their rooms, if Vera knows anything about kids. Stephanie starts to answer but Martin jumps in for her. “Stephanie’s Mom’s in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. I assume you know what that is.”
“Sure!” Vera prattles on, as if possessed. “Do I know Alzheimer’s? I think I’ve
got
it. Plain old-fashioned senility, only now it’s got somebody’s name, Herr Doctor Professor Alzheimer immortalized, you’d think he invented it. Like everything else these days—everyone wants to take credit.” She’s horrified and entirely out of control. Is this how screamers perceive themselves?
The Greens just look at her. Could they possibly not have heard? Well, God isn’t
that
merciful. Now Martin is rounding his vowels, pronouncing his consonants very distinctly as if Vera does indeed have Alzheimer’s or worse:
“My mother-in-law’s neurologist thinks it’s a tricky time to make changes. Particularly the phone. Calling here’s her lifeline…” This sounds to Vera like exactly the sort of lame, temporizing plan a doctor would come up with. Six months from now the poor woman will still be able to call, she just won’t remember who she’s calling. She wonders if Martin felt compelled to tell his neurologist buddy
why
they needed a new number. How embarrassing, confiding in your colleague: the whole neighborhood thinks you’re raising Lazarus from the dead. If it were
her
mother, thinks Vera, she wouldn’t be sitting here quoting some neurologist, she’d be pouring fountain-of-youth lemonade down her throat by the gallon, praying for it to dissolve that arterial plaque…
“I’m sorry,” says Vera, who’s sorrier than she can say. She’s sorry for Stephanie’s mother, sorry for being in this dark living room on a bright August afternoon. She’s sorry for writing that story, and sorry that even now, despite everything, she wishes it were true.
“You goddamn well ought to be,” says Martin. “Why would anyone pull a nasty stunt like that? You people must be pretty goddamn hard up for news.”
“We don’t report news,” Vera says. “We write fiction. We make it all up so things like this don’t happen.”
“Of course it’s made up,” Martin says. “You think we’ve got the fountain of youth flowing in our goddamn backyard? My question is, why you would write that? And the picture, the photo of my kids. Is that made up, too?”
“The picture’s real,” Vera says. “But I made up the rest to go with it.”
“Then what does that make us?” demands Martin. “Figments of your imagination?”
This is what it means to lock horns, Vera thinks. Heads lowered, bash, bash. Then Stephanie graces them with a smile so literally disarming, they’re just as suddenly unlocked, left gazing at her with the awe due St. Francis or the Bird Man of Alcatraz or any of those peace-making animal magicians.
“Martin,” she says. “Remember when the kids used to run around saying, ‘We’re Fig Newtons of your imagination’?”
“Sure,” says Martin. “The hippie babysitter taught them that, the same one who used to make Josh change Meggie’s diapers so he wouldn’t be uptight about his sister’s bodily functions.”
“Oh, what a mess,” says Stephanie, laughing. “Baby shit
everywhere
!”
Vera feels a prickle of envy: marriage, even marriage to controlling, hairy Martin Green. Such envy’s nothing she can’t transcend. Besides, she’s just noticed: something about Stephanie—her smile perhaps, or her laugh, that bony, angular grace—reminds her of Louise. It’s possible that under other circumstances, she and Stephanie might have been friends, making plans to pick up the kids after school, after dance class, drinking coffee and gossiping while Rosie tolerated and occasionally lowered herself to play with Megan and Josh. Stephanie rises abruptly and leaves the room, then comes back with a pack of low-tar cigarettes. When she lights up, Vera eyes the smoke so hungrily Stephanie asks if she wants one, and it takes every ounce of will Vera has to say, “No thanks. I quit.”
“So did Stephanie,” says Martin. “Up until last week. And I’ll tell you something else. Steph’s father died of lung cancer when he was forty-five.”
Vera’s “I’m sorry” is less an expression of sympathy than another apology. Is this her fault, too? Perhaps she should start counting: when she’s said she’s sorry a hundred times, she can leave. Perhaps by then she’ll have a better idea of what she’s sorry for. She’s come out here to apologize to the Greens; she still wishes she’d never written that piece. But that voice on the phone has saddled her with a new set of regrets—responsibilities for hopes raised and dashed—and a vision of heartbreak to make the Greens’ troubles look like everyday inconvenience. It almost makes her feel better. In six months, the Greens’ life will be back to normal, lawn thriving, kids in school, patients lined up for their pacemakers and vein grafts. But where will the phone caller be in six months?
That
makes her feel worse.