Peaceable Kingdom (15 page)

It takes a while for the audio to come back. When it does, Annette is saying, “People say dogs are smart. It’s something people say. People who never had dogs. I say, compared to what? Cats? In my experience dogs are very, very dumb. When I was growing up in Anchorage, the family across from us had a dog team they’d let pull the kids down the hill in front of their house, and one day the dogs pulled the sled and three kids right in the path of a snowplow. Brilliant.”

“Jesus,” Robert says. And a moment later, “You grew up in Anchorage?”

“Some dogs are smart,” says Christine. “Alexander.”

“Well,” says Annette. “Alexander. Christine’s dog.”

“What kind of dog was he?” Robert asks.

“A romantic,” Annette says.

Robert looks quizzically at Christine. And now there is no way for Christine not to say it, not to tell the story she has been thinking about all day: “Alexander fell in love. With a female collie down in Sheffield. He met her when we left him there with friends, one weekend we went away. The female lived up the road from our friends. She was in heat when we picked Alexander up, so we took her home with us, but she kept running away. So we brought her back to Sheffield, and the next day Alexander disappeared. He’d never run away before. We thought he was dead. And two days later our friends called to say he’d shown up at the collie family’s house.”

“Sheffield’s fifteen miles away,” Robert says.

“Fourteen point five,” Christine says. “We clocked it.” She remembers watching the odometer on John’s pickup, proud of their dog and jubilant that he was not only alive but in love. How eager they had been to fuse their lives then, for Stevie to be John’s child, Alexander to be Christine’s dog. But Alexander was never really—as Annette just called him—Christine’s dog. She still misses him, but it is John who took him to the vet when she was down in the city, John who, without ever saying much, has grieved.

She remembers the night they went to get Alexander from the collie family: the family lived in a tiny house, a cabin, the dogs were inside, stuck together, everyone was laughing, jumping out of their way, it was impossible to talk, but even so it seemed wrong to separate them. They left Alexander there until the female went out of heat and he was ready to come home.

Robert and Annette are waiting for more, but Christine has nothing to say. She is sorry she told the story. She thinks she has told it at the wrong time, to the wrong people, for entirely the wrong reasons, and for a moment it seems likely that she will never tell it again. And what good can come from telling a story about a dog that was more capable of passion than its owners may ever be? She gives Annette and Robert a little wave. Then she goes outside.

The light is almost gone. The guests have finished their food and are sitting at the tables, talking quietly. On each table is a lighted candle inside a paper bag. The muted lights are at once festive and unbearably sad. Christine looks around for Stevie, whom—after a scary minute or two—she spots in the field behind the house. She had been searching for the white suit, but Stevie has changed his outfit. He has borrowed someone’s black silk jacket with a map of Guam on the back; it comes nearly down to his knees. On his head is a set of stereo headphones, and instead of shoes he wears his winter moon-boots, silver Mylar that catches the light, thick soles that raise him inches off the ground. He is stalking fireflies in the high grass, lifting his legs very high, like a deer.

Christine is watching so intently that she jumps when John comes up beside her. They stand in easy silence for a few moments and then John says, “It doesn’t feel different, does it? Being married? It feels exactly the same.”

At first Christine doesn’t answer, but keeps on watching Stevie, who is moving his head oddly, again like a deer, as if he is tracking fireflies, not by looking for light, but by listening. Several doctors told them that Stevie is partly deaf. Each time, Christine and John sat in the office, nodding, thinking about the fact that often, when they were home alone with Stevie, he would stand and go to the door, minutes before it was possible to hear John’s truck or Christine’s car in the driveway. John used to say it was something Stevie had picked up from Alexander.

John’s face, in silhouette, strains forward. Staring across the dark lawn, he is trying very deliberately not to seem as if he is waiting for her to reply.

“It’s fine,” Christine tells him. “Nothing’s changed. We’ve always been married,” she says.

D
OUG (MY WIFE CALLS
her therapist Doug) says our family needs a mourning ritual, a formal rite to bring us together over what has been lost and what’s left. Doug’s office is full of primitive masks. I focused on a cone of ropy hair as he told us about the Amazonian tribe which, when too much went wrong, sent someone out to kill a jaguar and bury it under the headman’s house. I said, “We can do in the hamster.”

“Hamster?” said Doug.

“Murph,” said Beth. “Buzzy’s hamster.” Doug looked reproachful, as if his not knowing about the hamster made him wonder what else she’d withheld.

Not long after, the hamster died of natural causes. I felt it was my fault.

If you were driving beside us, stalled at the entrance to the West Side Highway, it would never occur to you that in our trunk is a half-frozen hamster we are on our way to bury on my sister’s farm. When you saw our quiet children, our twelve-year-old daughter, Holly, our six-year-old son, Buzzy, you would think they are better than your kids and wonder how we do it. How could you know that the children’s silence scares us, though Beth—in that quiet voice, in which, from their infancy, she half pretended they couldn’t hear—says, “Aren’t the kids being great? They always come through when we need them.” This is no more true than that the kids can’t hear. Sometimes they come through, sometimes they don’t. I have always been amazed by the places they could fight: crowded waiting rooms, the back seats of cars on icy drives. Now what we need from them is to fight as if nothing had happened, to bicker and scream like before.

So much has gone wrong, it seems gratuitous of Doug to trace it back so far: he says our problems began when I went alone to Jacksonville after my stepmother’s death—that I was angry at Beth and the kids for not coming with me. I don’t remember that. I remember it rained at La Guardia and later in Florida, too. Rain swept over the fuselage. I stayed in my seat in the warm bright plane, not wanting to ever get off—not stuck there, exactly, nothing like that, but just for the moment happy.

The road from the Jacksonville airport was half under water, and as the cab slowed down to part the oily floods, the driver said, “There’s a funny thing about this town. Sometimes on summer nights when it rains, you see puddles on the city streets—hopping, hopping with frogs.”

“Frogs?” I said. “From where?”

“The ocean,” he said. “I don’t know.”

As my father and I drove through the rain to Paglio’s Pizza, I mentioned this. He said frogs didn’t hatch out of puddles. Already he’d found a restaurant where all the waitresses knew him. There was no real food in his house. My stepmother had cooked natural food; the kitchen was full of grains and rice, jars of apricots and cashews. She had many health theories, like seasonal migration to alternate wet climates with dry. The accident had happened on a dude ranch near Tucson. They had just gotten back from a hike. She took a sip of soda from a can into which a wasp had fallen; it stung her on the tongue, and ten minutes later she was dead.

I asked why the ranch didn’t have a bee-sting kit. My father and I are both lawyers; we both knew he could have recovered the cost of a mini-ranch of his own. We didn’t talk about that. The phone rang often. I knocked around the house. All day I put off calling Beth and the kids; once I did it, I couldn’t look forward to it anymore. But when at last I talked to Beth, I was flipping through the Jacksonville phone book. The kids spoke too low or too fast, I couldn’t hear, couldn’t follow, couldn’t imagine their faces. I couldn’t wait to get off the phone.

The children know too much. That, too, is Doug’s idea. He says we put Band-Aids on wounds that would heal faster in the air. It’s strange, making Band-Aids sound so primitive and in the next breath praising people who bury jaguars under the headman’s house. I remember Band-Aids with love—the little red string that opens the wrappers, the rubber-adhesive smell.

Somewhere the Palisades turn into the Thruway. I have lost track of time. Six weeks, two months ago, I sat in guilty silence while Beth told the children their father had fallen in love with someone else, but now he was home, that was over. The good news was that Beth was pregnant, they were going to have a baby brother or sister. Beth had cooked pasta and lemon veal. I’d thrown some asparagus on. I should have pared the asparagus bottoms. Holly peeled back the hard asparagus skin, curling it in strips. Buzzy said, “Hey, that’s cool,” and I thought he meant the baby. But he meant what Holly was doing, and then he did it, too. I said, “Don’t play with your food.”

Buzzy said, “We don’t need another kid,” as if we should all just change our minds and return it like the flannel sleepers Beth’s parents still sometimes sent.

Two weeks later, Beth called me at work. I ran out and got a cab. Beth was waiting under the hospital awning. Her face was geisha-white. I couldn’t believe the emergency room had just let her leave on her own. A lawsuit flashed through my mind and flashed out again. I thought of the ranch without the first aid to save my stepmother’s life.

Beth slumped in the back of the cab. When we got home she went to bed. She said, “Martin, you tell the kids.” The kids didn’t seem to care about the baby; they were worried about Beth. I reassured them, thinking how much time had passed. I couldn’t remember telling them how babies were born. Now clearly they knew how they weren’t. Beth got her strength back soon, but she couldn’t get over the miscarriage—she was just streaming grief. It was right after this that she got me to go to Doug’s office, and Doug told us we needed a ritual.

We are not the same people we were. A year before, if I’d volunteered the hamster for ritual purposes, Beth would have burst out laughing. A year before, we would never have been in Doug’s office, with its good rugs and well-lit niches housing statuettes of pre-Columbian birth goddesses. But so much had gone wrong, so much changed and unpredictably lost, everything felt up for grabs, ready and waiting for another wasp swimming furiously in its pitch-black Pepsi sea.

On the morning Buzzy ran into the living room and said Murph wasn’t moving, Beth and I exchanged looks. It was the first time in months we’d looked at each other like that—a look that was like speech.

I said, “Isn’t that strange? Remember, in Doug’s office? You think Murph could have died for our sins?”

“Your sins,” said Beth, and then, miraculously, laughed. We went into Buzzy’s room. Beth said, “We can’t just throw him out.”

I said, “Okay, let’s bury him under the headman’s house.”

“We should bury him
somewhere
,” said Beth. “It’s what families always did. We buried our goldfish in the back yard. Didn’t you?”

I said, “My family didn’t have a back yard. Nor, do I have to point out, do we.”

Beth thought a minute. Then she said, “If you can believe you killed Murph by mentioning him in Doug’s office, I can believe it would help us to bury him in the ground.”

I told her I hadn’t been serious about putting a jinx on Murph. Should I have tried harder to convince her? For a lawyer, I am surprisingly unlitigious. I am retained by a mega-construction firm that tears down large buildings and puts up larger ones; I am not paid to argue in court but to see that we never get there.

I said, “What we have here is city life. Where to bury the family pet?”

No one could see digging a grave in Central Park or some patch of Westchester woods. We thought of my sister’s farm. I called Peg, who said come up, she’d love to see us, but her house was full of people two weekends in a row. I couldn’t say it was urgent.

When Buzzy realized that Murph was really dead, he sat on his bed and wailed. We had the hamster in a shoe box on the fire escape. The weather was getting warmer. Beth said, “Let’s put it in the freezer.”

Beth told the children that night, gave them—as Doug suggested—a fully worked-out plan. In three weeks, we would go up to Peg’s and bury Murph. The children said, “Fine.” That they didn’t seem to think it was strange was fairly strange in itself; they both have that overdeveloped child’s sense of what is and isn’t disgusting. Well, despite everything, we’re their parents; you can’t blame them for looking to us for guidance on what to do with the dead.

By then it was hard to feel Murph’s loss. Not that I’d felt his presence much—he was mostly Buzzy and Beth’s. Still, any death was a death, an absence in the house. Despite what Doug thinks, I am not afraid of sadness—quite the contrary, I’d say. But once we had Murph in the freezer, loss became a joke, a sign of confusion and distance and change which I avoid with random thoughts of work or food or pure survival as I fight for a lane in the press toward the Bear Mountain exit.

Doug has told Beth that I did what I did because I had never grieved over my mother; my stepmother’s death brought it back. He said I was out of touch with my feelings. He sent us an article, from a women’s magazine, about a guy who was eating dinner one night and started hemorrhaging from the throat. Three operations, a repaired major blood vessel, and two years of therapy later, he realized that all his emotions had been locked there, in his throat. Now he expresses them more. When I read that, I thought: He was already expressing them in his own way. Am I wrong in thinking that a family has a language of its own, that I did not have to bleed all over the lemon veal and the tough asparagus, that everything was clear enough from the tone in which I told my children to stop playing with their food?

When I was a child there were toy steering wheels that attached to the back of the front seat. I wore out a dozen of them, oversteering wildly as my father drove and my sister lay flat on the ledge behind the seat and looked out the back window. This was before seat belts and child safety. For years before I could drive, I dreamed about driving as flight, as freedom, a way of being with girls, the car as an extension of my body. Beth used to have panic dreams in which she was driving before she knew how; I never had dreams like that. Doug doesn’t approve of cars. He says they are bubbles that keep us apart, each in our separate world. He thinks we were better off walking single file through the jungle. I have never been in the jungle, and neither, as far as I know, has Doug.