I got the leash on Red Rover and we started walking again, toward the
Richardsons
’. They had two Scotties—an obvious choice for a couple of tweedy New Yorkers with vaguely British accents. The Scotties got along fine with the setter, and so to save time, we stopped to pick them up on the way to bringing Red Rover home. Their house was Tudor, naturally, and pretty grand, with lovely flower gardens and what seemed a big staff. The Richardsons walked their dogs themselves for a good hour or so every afternoon—which is when I had met them—coming home from the beach with Flora at the beginning of June. Mrs. Richardson was one of those blunt, loud, bangs-across-the-forehead women who seemed to believe that everyone else must surely be as pleased with her as she was with herself for being so no-nonsense and direct and, as she saw it, egalitarian. She and her husband were astonished at the paroxysm of stumpy tail-wagging their two little dogs launched into as we passed each other, and astonished further by the way they lowered their bellies to the ground as I bent down to scratch their ears.
“They’re usually terribly standoffish,” she said in her semi-British way. Leaning over the edge of her stroller, Flora was delighted by them, too, and so a conversation began between us, and Mrs. Richardson learned by direct inquiry that I lived in that sweet cottage with the dahlias (interested) and went to the academy (more interested) and baby sat for this child of the famous artist (most interested) down the road. Staring straight into my face with the divine right of a dowager queen, she said, “You’re very pretty, aren’t you?” She turned to her husband, who carried a pipe.
“Isn’t she?” Embarrassing us both.
“I bet you’re bright, too, and industrious, aren’t you?” She could have been a black-and-white character actress in pearls, staring at me through a monocle.
“You’ve certainly charmed my dogs,” she said. Just as we parted—the Scotties digging their little gray nails into the road to express their reluctance to move on—I mentioned that I walked dogs, too, for some of our neighbors.
“Do you?” she said. She smiled smugly at her husband—didn’t I say she was industrious?--and then turned back to me. Well, then, she said, seeing how her dogs had taken to me, and seeing how they were growing rather stout, she wondered if I wouldn’t like to come by the house some morning and walk them a bit while she and her husband played golf. I would like to, I said, as if I were correcting her (telling Flora, after we had pushed on, that if I wouldn’t like to, I wouldn’t, would I?). And so it was arranged.
As usual, the dogs were handed over to me at the back door by one of the maids (“A maid?” Daisy whispered, laughing, as if I had said a leprechaun or a centaur). And since they were far more predictable than Red Rover, I handed both their leashes to Daisy and kept Red’s for myself. The road the Richardsons lived on was wider and grander and lined with great oaks that were lush and fresh that time of year, bordered with green grass and dark hedges, and at one point as we walked along, I held back a bit so I could watch Daisy, with her messy red hair (I vowed to braid it later) and in my old dress and the cherished pink slippers and the sandy socks, walk regally behind the plump and pampered Scotties, who, in the same year that Daisy had been born to her baby-beleaguered parents, had been flown first-class from Edinburgh to Idlewild, to be delivered into Mrs. Richardson’s waiting arms.
We put Red Rover back into his pen with fresh water and some dog biscuits and the reassurance that we would return in late afternoon, and then walked the Scotties back to my house to pick up our beach things before we got Flora. Tony and Petey Moran were already sitting on my back steps, Petey with a new quarter-moon cut under his eye that had almost blackened it. The two boys fell on the two dogs as soon as we were inside the yard with them—literally fell on them, like half wit hillbillies chasing a greased pig, going down on them chest first, their arms spread, and then rolling in the grass as the dogs, with surprising speed and presence of mind, and even a bit of a growl, scooted away. I had to raise my voice (to the boys, not the dogs) to restore order, and then I got both boys and both dogs and Daisy to sit in a circle on the lawn. The poor Scotties were panting by then, and Petey and Tony seemed to be panting, too, with love and desire and their wild blue-eyed affection for all creatures they could pet or caress and, often in the same gesture, hurt. I let Petey sit beside one (Angus, I think; I never could tell them apart) and Tony beside the other (Rupert) and watched them gently stroke their dogs for a few minutes, the dogs quickly growing accustomed to the long, soothing strokes, if not to the little-boy faces hanging beside theirs, hovering as if to plant a kiss. At one point Tony slipped his arm around the dog and tried to pull it into his lap, but I stopped him. These were not really old dogs, I explained, but they had really old owners, and if the boys were not calm they might very well end up with a nose bitten off. I guided their hands over the tops of the dogs’ heads and down their backs.
“Nice and calm,” I said. Then I introduced Daisy, and the two boys gazed at her out of their trance of affection.
“My cousin.
She’s here to help me for the summer.”
“Hi,” they said, and then Petey added, “I like your shoes,” something of both larceny and lechery in his voice, a tone aided and abetted no doubt by the pirate patch of a black eye. Petey was maybe nine or ten that summer, and had only recently gotten over his habit of asking me, at constant three-minute intervals, “Do you like me?”
“Do you like my brother?”
“Do you like my mom?”
“Do you like me?” He was the neediest of the Moran kids, and they were a needy lot.
Twice in the past year he had spent the night under the hedge outside my bedroom window, and twice my parents had considered calling Child Services about him. But he was well fed and went to school and his cuts and scrapes and bruises were no different from any of the cuts and scrapes and bruises of his siblings, all of which seemed to be the product of bad luck and ill timing, accident and fate. When I asked Petey what he’d done to his eye, Tony explained for him that he had been running around with two juice glasses on his face, pretending they were binoculars, and had smashed right into a door jamb.
“You must have been going pretty fast,” I said.
“He said he was chasing the last remaining looney bird on earth,” Tony said.
“And who was the looney bird?” I asked Petey.
He bowed his head.
“Baby June,” he said, and then, abashed, buried his face in Angus’s (or Rupert’s) neck. Surprisingly enough, the dog, still panting, tolerated it, even thumped his tail a bit and raised one paw as if to stay balanced. Perhaps he realized that in all his eight years at the
Richardsons
’, he’d never been quite so necessary. I leaned across the grass and put a hand on Petey’s prickly head.
“Perfectly understandable,” I said, hoping it would mean, “I like you, Petey.”
When boys and dogs seemed properly subdued, I gave the ends of the leashes to Daisy and, standing slowly, walked back into the house. I gathered our beach things and made our sandwiches—all the while glancing out the window to make sure everything was all right, because with the Moran kids, you could never be sure. But the dogs were lying in the grass by now, the boys still stroking their coats, and it seemed Petey and Tony and Daisy were actually having some kind of conversation.
Daisy was idly braiding the leashes together, nodding, and Tony was slowly pulling at the grass as he talked. I wondered if they were commiserating—about too many siblings and harried parents and a family in which you were loved, but perhaps not well enough. About houses that smelled of wet wool and old socks and hastily applied industrial cleaner, where parents sometimes stumbled on your name or slapped you without meaning to or looked at you as if you were everything they’d ever wanted going down the drain—and then closed a door and forgot you completely, crying, Oh, where is it? Oh, what happened? Oh, oh, oh—in misery and happiness and anger and laughter and pain.
I made two extra sandwiches for the Moran kids, but just as I brought them outside, two of the girls showed up, Judy, who was about eleven, and baby June, whose drooping diaper was so wet it seemed to leave a kind of damp slug’s trail on the grass.
I sent Judy back to their house for a new one and changed the baby right there on the lawn, Tony and Petey standing over me, eating their sandwiches and offering casual bits of guidance (“There’s a piece of grass on her tush”), like construction workers on coffee break. I tossed the wet diaper into my mother’s empty laundry basket at the side of the house and let the boys walk the Scotties to the corner, Judy and the baby coming along, too, where I told them all I really had to get to work. They turned back readily enough, but a few minutes later Tony and Petey came zooming by on their banana bikes, slowing beside us and circling around us and then zooming up again. They were waiting there when we emerged from the Richardsons’ driveway after dropping off the dogs and followed us most of the way to the Clarkes’ as well, until they were distracted by a red convertible with a wide and startlingly white interior that passed by on an intersecting road.
Standing straight up on their pedals, they headed off to see if they could chase it down and find out if it belonged to a movie star.
“We’ll let you know,” Petey shouted back over his shoulder, his voice deep and serious, full of comic-book urgency. It was clear that there were two of us now whom he wanted to impress.
“He likes you,” I said to Daisy, and she smirked and shrugged and said the requisite “Eeww,” and then, when I said it again, the pro forma “Does not.”
I stopped and bent down and took hold of her skinny leg. I lifted her foot, and she leaned against me, hopping on the other to keep her balance. I pretended to inspect her shoe. I could see how the white socks were still peppered with grains of sand. There was a shiny scar on her knee and a series of black-and-blue marks down her freckled calf. A girl with brothers.
“Your shoes are getting pinker,” I said, dropping one leg and picking up the other one.
“You must be in love.”
The Clarkes’ house was vaguely Victorian, with a nice big front porch and a back patio that looked out on a wide sloping lawn and a little pond surrounded by cattails and dragonflies.
Mr. and Mrs. Clarke were friends of my parents who shared the same city background and middle-class income, the house itself being an inheritance from a bachelor uncle of Mr. Clarke’s who had done well in the garment industry. In my childhood I had been enchanted by the house, not only because of its pond and porch, the diamond-shaped panes in its bay windows, or its turret and widow’s watch, but also because I believed for many years that it actually had been given to Mr. Clarke by a fairy—by his fairy uncle, as I’d heard him say, or, his uncle the fairy. In the wonderland that was my solitary childhood, such a bequest—a wave of a cattail wand, a flash of sunlight on a beveled pane of glass, a flutter of dragonfly wings—seemed both credible and marvelous. Had I not learned the truth of the matter in my freshman year at the academy (it was, I’m afraid, more of a slow, disappointed dawning than a flash of illuminating light), I might, on this pretty June morning now full of bee sound and birdsong and the scent of mown grass, have told Daisy the same.
The Clarkes spent every summer in an apartment on the
Westchester
family, the Swansons, from June to September.
The’ cats belonged to the Clarkes, but the
Westchester
family liked the idea of renting the cats as well, so their children could have the experience of pets without the year-long obligation. I was part of the bargain, too. I took care of the cats on weekdays when the Swansons went home (unlike so many of the summer mothers whose husbands worked in the city, Mrs. Swanson would not spend five nights a week out here alone), and I sometimes baby sat for the kids as well on Saturday nights. My parents wouldn’t let me take any money from the Clarkes, since they were friends and apparently struggling to keep the old house in good repair, but the Swansons always drank too much at dinner and paid me twice what I asked when they came home.
The Clarkes and their tenants had one of those odd, long term relationships that seemed more like a custody deal than a summer rental. Although they had no children themselves (they had cats, and the fact that they were willing to rent out their cats as well as their house probably tells you all you need to know about them), the Clarkes had allowed the Swansons to install a basketball hoop over the garage and a small swing set in the side yard. They’d also let the Swansons put an extra refrigerator in the basement and an awning over the patio.
When the Swansons offered to replace all the kitchen appliances and repaint most of the rooms, the Clarkes had complied. They’d also let them buy the wicker furniture for the porch and tear up the fairly new wall-to-wall carpeting and refinish the wood floors. In another summer or two, the Swansons would offer to install an in-ground pool, a real coup for the Clarkes (my parents thought), who got both a boost to their property value and further insurance that their faithful and generous renters would indeed return for many more summers. Later still, long after I’d moved away and in the midst of outlandish interest rates and a depressed real estate market, the Swansons would offer the Clarkes a princely sum for their house—enough for them to buy another on the North Shore as well as a condo in Florida—a cause for much discussion among my parents and the Clarkes, who urged us to talk to a real estate agent ourselves.