The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals (2 page)

“Lauren,” said the barber and chuckled. “Why don’t you take a scarf from the rack over there and return it next time you ride by?” He pointed with his scissors to a series of hooks affixed to the wall: mittens, hats, scarves, hanging from them. “Customers leave half themselves behind almost every time,” the barber said. “Most never return for their things,” and he shook his head at the wrongness, the waste, which I went towards, one scarf in particular catching my eye, made not of wool but of feathers—sunset pink, and soft, too, when I touched them. I took the scarf from the hook and wrapped it round my neck and saw myself in the glass, a bird girl. The barber smiled. “It’s you,” he said, and I said, “Thanks,” and then I left, the day darkening now, the windows of restaurants starting to glow as I headed home, feathers flying.

It was March when I got my Schwinn. By June, after school let out, I was riding farther each day. I rode under bridges where pigeons clustered in the rafters above me, chirring softly or sleeping with heads beneath wings. I rode over highways and dipped down into towns where stores lined the streets, displaying their wares on the sidewalk, banners of silk and chimes. Every day I pushed on just a little farther, the houses at last becoming scarce, lawns giving way to meadow where wild turkeys pecked at seeds. I was after something here, but if you had asked me what it was I could not have told you. In my mind I saw those police horses, in the blizzard, atomizing into particles of white. I sought, perhaps, to assemble something. I sought, perhaps, the experience of distance itself, learning each day that I could create it, imagining as I rode that a long red ribbon spooled from my pocket, marking my forward progress while, in reverse, it pointed me towards home, when the darkness came. The ghetto’s cropped and careful lawns gave way to messy meadows, and the messy meadows became fields, and as they did I drew closer to what it was. A place without look-alike houses. A place where my mother’s sadness did not suffuse—even the smallest things—so whatever you saw or touched or tasted had her in it, to such a point that it sometimes seemed like the whole world was a woman with her name on it. I sought something separate.

The country. I was miles from home when I finally found it. The country came to me first as a distant but distinct odor: Sweet decaying dung piled high by paddocks. And then there were novel sounds, like the
kunk kunk
of a woman hoeing her earth or the squeal of a big barn door opening slowly for a spotted cow to pass through. Red barns blazed at the far fringes of fields and, roadside, the occasional house listed left or right.

Now that I’d found the country, I ceased riding without reason and, every day that summer I mounted my bike and pointed myself in a precise direction. What I knew was that people disappeared, if you went far enough, and then there was just you and the enormous yolk of sun and the cows with their heads hanging over their low fencing. At first I fed the cows grass I pulled from the roadside, their limber lips pulling in green, munching and munching while foam collected at the corners of their mouths. Then I touched their mouths—a buttery, leathery softness—and then, without thinking, I scooted beneath the fence and found myself inside a whole new kind of box, the biggest box I’d ever seen, the fenced field sloping down to a clot of trees and bramble bushes sporting exorbitant pink platters of flowers. I stood still, listening, but it seemed I was the only human sound around. I whistled and heard my echo bounce around, and as it dissipated, the cows, one by one, began to go down, sleepy, all of a sudden, their front legs buckling first, then their hind sides, their long-lashed eyes closing in the summer sun, big mounds of breathing I touched with the flat of my palm, feeling their sleep rise up into me, and then the ache of exhaustion came over me, too, and, and so I, too, slid down on my seat and put my head against the haunches of a mottled female, hearing her insides tick and gurgle, feeling her shift and stretch with the rhythm of her dreams, and then my dreams, how long they lasted I’m not sure, but when I woke I was still against her side and the sun was still in the sky. I stood. Beneath me she slept on, her udder rising and falling with her breath. I knelt down then, right next to those four fatty teats, as long as my fingers, but boneless. As gently as I could I placed my hand on her milk bag, surprised by how hot it was, by how hard, despite her gentle easy sleep. I enclosed one teat in my fist and gave the softest, most tentative tug, a spritz of milk spraying me in the face; I stumbled backwards. The cow lowed. She opened one enormous eye and looked at me, and then lowed again, long and sonorous. From the distance I heard someone call and then I saw him, a man coming up the hill, his broad-brimmed hat bobbing as he walked. I scuttled back under the fence, hopped on my bike and pedaled as fast as I could in the direction of home, which was far from here, the light going now, my heart clattering in its cage as if I’d stolen something—milk—and then, mile by mile, my whole body slowing, a sad sort of sinking as the rural retreated and I smelled the suburbs coming closer, barbecues and gasoline. Maybe an hour passed before I dared look behind me, at what I’d left. By then, of course, there was nothing to see, the farmland too deep in the distance, my hands sticky with milk, and sweet to the taste when I lifted them to my lips.

She sensed something but could not say what it was. I was slipping from her, and rather than grieve, she became angry. “Where do you go every day?” my mother asked me, and I shrugged and said, “Just around.” Once I saw her in the laundry room. She held my shirt by the shoulders and slowly brought it to her nose and then, with a quick flick of her wrist, she dropped it in the washer. At nine my body was a board, my chest flat, the nipples so pale they were barely there. But she sensed, I think, some subtle shift, not yet here but near. I had dirt beneath my fingernails and briars in my hair. After we were all supposed to be asleep my parents argued, and sometimes they said my name—
Lauren, Lauren—
so I knew I was part of the problem, but which part, and which problem? When he left her each time she was crying, always crying in her Kleenex, the trashcan piled high with crumpled tissue. By night her tears softened her and she leaked like any other mammal, but by day her face was a mask tied tightly to her skull. The evening I came home after touching the teat, she looked at me darkly, as if she knew. “Wash up for dinner,” she snapped, and I did, soaping my arms up to their elbows, rubbing my face with suds, but some essential smell was on me now. We ate at the dining room table and when I went to reach for the peas I knocked my milk glass over, and the liquid dripped off the table edge, darkening the carpet below. “Goddamnit!” my mother said, her voice all wrong, too tight, and when I looked into her face I saw it had cracked, the way land cracks in the high heat; she had a zig-zag rent running from her forehead to her chin and from the rent came a red light. “Calm down, Barbara,” my father said while my brother and sisters sat silent. “Calm down?” my mother spat back at him, a question he couldn’t answer. He shook his head slowly and, with his napkin, began to mop up the mess. “You,” my mother said, pointing at us with her fork. “You think he’s so sweet? Dear old dad,” she said, and then laughed. “You’ll never know,” she said, “what it means to live like this.” That night, in bed, her words were in my head. To live like what? I wondered.

The next morning, at breakfast, still wondering and paying no attention, I spilled my milk again and she hit the side of my face so hard a bruise formed atop my cheekbone, where my hair hung down so no one could see. That day I rode fast to the country, fast to the cows, but when I got there they were gone, the pasture empty. For four days I came back, in search of milk I could spill, and for four days I found just sun-baked land, the goldenrod thick on the banks by the low fence. I began to think it was a dream, no dung, nothing, to prove otherwise.

And so I went on. I pushed past that pasture and found others, but the cows were always on the far side and they ignored me, rebuffed me, even when I held out bunches of greens. In some ways it didn’t matter because I was surrounded, out there, surrounded by hip-high grasses and lime-colored crickets poised on oval leaves. The air was packed with a complex jumble of scents I learned, over time, to separate into segments; the dung, the sweat, the hay, the loam, the flower-packed fields, the pigs in their pen, the dense smell of slop in a rubber bucket. I found a wild grapevine, the bulbous fruits taut, dark juice spurting when I bit into their bodies, the seeds, which I spit into my palm, afloat in a light green gel.

The vine, which grew along an unkempt fence, was so ridden and rife with fruit that it took me days of eating to follow its trail around a corner, up a small hill, and into a cove where all of a sudden the daylight vanished, the trees here packed together, trunk to trunk, their enormous branches creaking when the breezes blew. Tacked to one of the trunks was a rusted tilted sign: “Private Way,” and, indeed, when I looked down at my feet I saw they were on some sort of rutted path, overgrown with brambles and barely visible, but a path nonetheless.

Private Way.
My parents had many private ways, their clues just crumpled tissues or dagger glances tossed across our heads, as though we would not notice. My mother had her private ways, that rent I’d seen in her face, the red light coming from the rip there, suggesting that her insides were bright and quite possibly too much to bear. The bruise on my cheek was a private way, hidden by my hair, a stamp, a suggestion, a clue for someone to find, but no one found it. I was sick of secrets. Thus I decided to discard the sign, not literally, but to discard it nonetheless. I was going to go here, where I was not wanted. I parked my bike by the base of a tree and, following the private path, made my way into those woods.

Darkness. Deep suede shade. Vines twirled around tree trunks, disappearing into the uppermost level of leaves, which clapped when the wind blew, as if I had an audience—eyes—watching. I looked left, then right, trying to see who saw, catching a gleam, hearing a hoot, and then gone. I found, in the dense undergrowth, a rusted tractor, its body orange, its tires flattened, the seat ripped open so its coils sprung free. The tractor glowed in the dank forest, a machine long lost but as if alive. It was hunkered down so silently, its silence suggesting something strange about it, as if at any moment its engine might leap into life. As I crept closer I stumbled across a large bug-eaten boot and then a sound—sudden—surrounding me, this high humming, someone else here, but where? Again I looked, left, then right, up, then down, the sound intensifying as I neared the broken, radiant machine, the humming hard to describe; it made my ears ache and yet it called me closer, the sound of a thousand voices or of just one, a girl perhaps, a single girl singing in a tree above the tractor.

I called out then:
Helloooooo
, and I swear the humming ceased for a second and then started again. The tractor had two enormous headlights, and the sun slanting through the trees made the bulbs beneath the lenses look lit. I reached out to touch the lens, and for some reason I saw myself then, standing in the kitchen, my mother crying, I, reaching out to touch the lens of her eye, which in my mind was stilled, gone to glass, beyond blinking. I saw myself in the snap of a second touching her where one never would and finding a terrible fixed stillness as she stared at me like a doll, and then my own eyes went wet from a sadness much too unwieldy to put in some package, the humming now higher, now harder, and coming from …
here.
In an instant I saw the spot, in the busted fluff of the machine’s ripped seat. I craned my neck out, looked over the lip of leather, and discovered, in the seat, the squirm and throb of thousands. A nest it was, a whole humming home in there. I picked up a stick, then, and, surprised by the coldness of my curiosity, I used it to poke and prod. The humming went wild in response. I saw the glint of wings, too big for bees, the wings flexed and fluttered and then, one by one, from deep in the center of the tractor’s torn seat, dragonflies, hundreds of dragonflies, rose like royalty into the air, hovered briefly above me, and then swerved up steeply, disappearing into the tops of trees. I dropped the stick. I’d seen dragonflies before, of course, but these were different, because their electric blue bodies throbbed in the draped forest; because they were en masse and audible, and because their presence in a place I was not supposed to be saturated them with significance, turned them to Tinker Bells, or eerie fairies. On and on they went, ascending from the seat, carving paths in the dark air, going up, diving down, swinging around, around, and around. Yes. I was with wings.

That summer, and thanks to my Schwinn, the Private Way became for me a place where I could question. Looking back on it now I wonder why it didn’t occur to me to be scared—a girl alone in the woods and crimes happening everywhere, all the time, but I wasn’t scared, not then, anyway. That was the summer a girl named Emma Gin disappeared, her parents appearing on TV, making pleas, and not long after pieces of her found in the Wayland woods, and yet I wasn’t scared. I wasn’t in the Wayland woods, but even if I had been I don’t think it would have mattered. What scared me were houses, things too carefully cut, or the shining aisles of the supermarket where meats were packed in plastic. What scared me were dinner times and the tongue my mother served one night, the tastebuds visible.
Taste it
, she said;
it’s kosher.
I put the tongue on my tongue and felt trapped, then, in the absurdity of an experience where there were no words to define or even describe. We ate the tongue with our tongues, under orders. My father, trying to back my mother or maybe just a dedicated meat eater, said it was delicious. The meat was a livid pink, a plank on my plate,
all gone.
First in the fields, and then in the forest, following the overgrown path of someone’s private way, things seemed possible again, enchanting, chantable, each unusual item explicable and attached to some scheme I sensed made sense, even if I hadn’t yet grasped it. When my mother cried, there was no answer to her tears, but the high humming had revealed itself to me as an insect with a name and a place. At home, in the “D” volume of our encyclopedia, I looked up dragonflies and learned that they had large compound eyes that saw in every direction all at once. Small now, they had once, in the Jurassic era, been as big as birds, darting and diving over ponds where dinosaurs drank. I put the “D” volume back on the shelf and pulled out the “Z,” fanning the pages, each one gilt edged, the pictures blurring by; I saw zebras and zygotes and zeniths, and I felt as if someone were stirring a stick in the center of me, awakening within me my own high humming, my own need for naming, describing, defining, while also becoming aware, right then and there, that knowing was not the same as answering. If you had asked me who my mother was I could have answered you. Yet I knew nothing of her. I did, however, know something about those dragonflies, their enormous eyes, their pupae, that they were born in water and grew wings only at the very end of their lives, learning to fly just as they were about to die.