Dog House (5 page)

She grabs my hand, puts it on the foot of the bowl underneath. I think I may feel a little something.

“Well, okay. But really, it's not that expensive, and maybe you can have the chip ground down.” (The sun is hot. I've finished the Coke.)

“What if I pay cash? How much for cash?”

“It still has to be eight dollars. I'm only making a dollar.”

(Whining here?)

“Yeah, yeah. What do you think, Harry? Do you like it? You wouldn't have a pair, wouldyou?”

“Gee, no.”

“Well, I don't know. I really wanted a pair.”

She starts to walk away.

“Wait,” I call after her. “Look, I haven't sold anything all day. You can have it for seven dollars.”

I somehow haven't noticed that the husband hasn't left.

“I don't have to pay sales tax, do I?”

“Not if you have a resale number.”

“Well, but you gave me a dealer's discount, so why do I have to pay sales tax?”

“Are you a dealer?”

“Well, sort of.”

“Then you have a resale number.”

“But I don't have it on me.”

“Then I have to charge you sales tax.”

“Look, forget it. I don't need a chipped bowl anyway. ”

And it's over.

“Oh, all right. Take it. I'll pay the sales tax myself.”

Which is how I lost money and cried a lot.

I liked the suntan, though (we did, back then), and I eventually learned to price everything a good deal higher than I really wanted to sell it for so I could reduce it. That's when I began to make some money, although it may just have been because I stopped buying cups and saucers and chipped plates and began to buy things that people really needed, like marrow scoops and snuff boxes.

 

 

By the time we'd moved from “our building” in Queens to that first house with the Japanese maple, Barden was eight and I had parlayed my start-up capital into a real business, a business that paid my dental bills and actually bought me the first of my old Humbers (i.e., English cars). In addition, conveniently near Barden's new school, I'd found myself a business partner; a nice old woman (she was forty-five) who thought she might be able to use a little help in her long-established antiques store in a pretty little town called Locust Valley—a town that reminded me of the silver-screen Brigadoon—utterly bucolic, complacently obsolescent and so difficult to find that you wouldn't have been surprised to learn that it disappeared each time you drove away.

And that was how—and where—I became a shopkeeper. That was why my poor kid was forced to sit in the store every day from three fifteen until my four thirty closing—doing homework, eating the guilt junk I let him eat and reading the guilt comic books I let him buy. Not to mention those weekends he got dragged along for the shlepping and unpacking on the hot asphalt parking lots, and the frantic early buying at local school fairs where I made him sit on what I'd picked so it wouldn't get away. All of which explains why I began to feel he needed—
no, deserved
—another dog.

 

 

Have you ever been to the pound? Back in 1970, it looked like a prison camp and probably still does. Everything in the pound could be nicely hosed down because everything was cinder block except the fences, which were chain link and six feet tall. Each of the abandoned dogs lived in a concrete-floored pen with a metal bowl of water and a pan of permanently half-eaten moist food dotted with flies. As you walked down the aisle between the pens, all the dogs barked and yapped, but without real conviction: sort of like “Well, if you other guys think there's something to bark at, I guess I do, too.” That is, all the dogs except the shy, sad-eyed ones who retreated to the backs of their cages and stared fearfully and never barked at all and the few mildly curious, silent pups that put their noses to the wire. Every time I stopped by the pound (I needed, sometimes, to pet a dog), I'd be reminded of those 1930s prison films where the inmates run their cups across their bars to noisily confirm their own existence, aware, surely, that it's an exercise in futility, though no guard would dare approach without a wood baton or gun. Here, moreover, you were permitted to,
wanted
to, reach a naked hand in to brush a cold nose or slide an ear or two between your fingers.

My pound's wardens allowed a kind of canine speed-dating. You could walk a candidate out on a leash to an enclosed exercise space where, ostensibly, you and your potential responsibility for the next ten or fifteen years could get to know each other. But you couldn't get to know each other, of course; either because the poor animal was mad with excitement at being let out of its pen or because it was spooked and made instantly catatonic by the unexpected nearness of its cellmates and large, inept you, who was incredibly nervous about whether you were holding its leash too tight or not tight enough; about the fact that, jeez, this dog looks a lot bigger out here than it did in there; about whether you appeared to its watchful keepers like someone who'd never had a pet and didn't deserve one.

They knew about Pretty Boy. And Tippy.

 

 

Out of this hygienic meat market, though, came Barden's beloved Fluffy, a needle-nosed purebred collie: smallish, but, well—fluffy. He'd been left at the pound by a family whose newest child was allergic to dog hair.
They said.
Because who, after all, would willingly give up a beautiful, year-old, housebroken (!!!!) collie? Worse, who would name such a noble creature
Fluffy?
Not a name I'd have chosen. Not when he could have been “King's Golden Knight,” the grandish kennel name that appeared on his papers from the grander AKC. Yes, our Fluffy had a genuine pedigree, which impressed ten-year-old Barden greatly, as did the fact that this dog truly
looked
like—well, you remember—the-dog-that-scrambled-through-raging-rivers-and-forests-and-escaped- the-clutches-of-dognappers-(with god knows what in mind!)-to-return-after-much-suffering-to-the-happy-domesticity-of carrying-books-and-rescuing-children-who' d-fallen-down-a-well.

Nevertheless, remembering our noncompliant Tippy, I figured we might have a better shot at being listened to if we didn't confuse the dog with a name change. So Fluffy he came to us, and Fluffy he remained. Although as time passed and we knew him better, he grew a few extra names (as did all our dogs), and wound up as “King's Golden Knight Fluffy Crusher Dry Toast.” (“Crusher” was Barden's; “Dry Toast” was mine. Predictably, Millard liked “Fluffy.”)

The “Crusher” part was ironic, because Fluffy had the mildest of personalities. So mild, in fact, that it was next to nonexistent. Had there been a canine high school, Fluffy would have been eating lunch at the geek table. No cheerleader, no cool, lopsidedly grinning prom king, our Fluff. No grins or big, panting smiles from him at all, actually. Not like the ones you get from Labs or golden retrievers. No “Oh, boy, where have you been—I'm beside myself that you've come home at last—kiss me!” On the contrary, our elegant collie always seemed a little wan, a little dull. Lackluster, truth be told. Though not precisely Dry Toast. He didn't remind anyone of dry toast. That was merely a name I'd always wanted to try out. Sort of like Barden.

We took turns taking Fluffy for walks.

Millard liked to go around the block so the two of them could check out our neighbor's lawns and shrubs. Barden's preferred route (walking not being his “thing”) was up to a mimosa tree about a hundred yards from the house. Mine was in any direction that didn't include Louie, one of the few other dogs in the neighborhood and the only one that lifted its leg on my shoes. He especially liked me in sandals.

 

 

Barden turned sixteen in our first house. He also turned into my closest, funniest friend. He was smart, and handsome in an exceptionally tall and formal way. During the seventies, for instance, when his classmates came to school in shredded hippy leathers and tattered jeans, Barden dressed each day in a three-piece suit and a pocket watch. (My father confided to me once that talking to ten-year-old Barden on the phone was like asking a banker for a loan.) He was entirely unaware of his odd courtliness; of how peculiar it must have seemed to his peers that he liked classical music and liked to spend time with his parents. He wouldn't have cared, however. He was always purely his own person.

 

 

And when he was sixteen, he also went away to boarding school.

Millard was in the throes of starting his business manufacturing aircraft indicator cases (you don't want to know; it's a real conversation stopper) and had less time to be with me, so I was finding myself a little too dependent on Barden's company. There was our shared interest in music. My overinterest in his homework. My too-thorough knowledge of the littlest details of his life—his friends, his teachers, his stereo. And I was so busy making myself so obliging, so lovable, so thoroughly a pal, that he loved to be with me, too. Eventually, however, I could see myself edging into some twilight of the vicarious, and I decided to break the bond.

That's the sad thing with mothers. We painstakingly mold our kids into people we really want to spend time with, and then, just when the conversation begins to get interesting, it's time to let go.

But right before he went away and left me with no one to care about what was for dinner, I persuaded Millard—who had always seemed wonderfully happy to be wherever he was. Millard—who had never spent a moment contemplating anything resembling Change and throughout our lives never would—to put our house up for sale so we could move into something a little bigger, with a den and a two-car garage, maybe. Something a little more interesting and a little closer to my store: this last because my partner had decamped to Maine, and I would be alone in the shop all the time now—except for the occasional appearance of the rare customer who wasn't “just looking” and who was, therefore, interrupting my reading.

I needed a project.

 

 

Unfortunately, we found a buyer for our house immediately.

“Unfortunately” because it dawned on us right away that we must have asked too low a price. And Millard couldn't leave it alone.

“Do you think we should have asked more? Maybe we should have hired a Realtor? Would they have taken the house if it had been five hundred dollars more, do you think?”

Particularly “unfortunately” because we had no other house to move to.

The night after we accepted the offer, Millard was so distraught that he went to the liquor cupboard and grabbed a treasured bottle of brandy and drank steadily and straight until midnight. I'd never seen him do that—before or after—and I've wondered about it for years.

Recently, I've decided that it must have been because he dreaded Change more than anything else in life.

After all, he still owned the name-taped clothes he'd worn at camp, and wore them, too. Which tells you both how plump he was as a thirteen-year-old and how slim he became as a man. (Barden wears them now.) The college sweaters and jackets he put on every day to go to work had pipe tobacco burns down the front and holes in the elbows. Sometimes he had me take them to the tailor to have leather patches put on. If one or the other sweater or jacket wore out, he'd buy one exactly like it—same color, same size, same style.

I sometimes wonder if I had died first, what about his second wife?

 

 

But if Millard reveled in salvage and repair, it was because he was good at it. (And to tell the truth, my business only flourished because I could buy anything broken and he could make anything work.) He did our sewing, fixed our shorted wires, sweated our pipes, hooked up the stereo he'd built from scratch himself. His proudest possession was his giant cache of well-worn tools—all the needle-nose pliers; Phillips-head screwdrivers; shiny, scary dental tools; Black and Decker drills; Sears saws; wood-handled awls; and paint-smeared hammers that had been with him since boyhood. Each, he once confided to me, had its own personality.

We were putting together a stool.

“You know, I love this screwdriver,” he said shyly, holding it up so it briefly reflected the fluorescent lights in his workshop: a medium-long screwdriver with a red-striped Bakelite handle. “It just feels so right in my hand, and the business end is worn down now, so it's perfect. I got it when I was a Scout.” He smiled lovingly at the screwdriver, and I smiled at him.

 

 

But Millard got very drunk that house-sale night, so drunk that he and Fluffy and I had to walk it off in the darkened streets, passing and repassing each of the four types of Tudor and three Colonials that comprised our tidy neighborhood. We talked and talked about our future and whether we could afford our future and how things had been for his parents and my parents, and why it was that our own lives didn't seem to be as easy—as predetermined—as theirs had been. He was terrified; I could hear that in the dark. But he couldn't say so.

I was frightened that he was frightened.

 

 

Every now and then, when I consider the anguish my Love of the New caused my husband over four decades plus, I ask myself why he'd married a woman—well, a girl—who was the very personification of the “novelty-seeking gene.” An original early adopter.

Unlike my apocryphal dog-loving gene, science has actually discovered that such a thing exists and that it isn't only real, it's also hereditary. I have it, of course, as did my mother and younger brother, and it's caused us all—and our patient spouses—endless trouble. But, frankly, after all these years, I've found it a real comfort to know I'm not actually to blame for my improvidence. It's chemistry. Ah yes.