The Dogs of Littlefield (17 page)

Life is interesting,
Dr. Vogel had said a few sessions ago.

If only, Margaret thought, I could see it all as interesting, then that's what it would be.

A capacious sadness filled her, and with it a great relief. At last she understood. At last it had come to her: she was just like everyone else who had troubles, and if she was interested in her own troubles, she was also interested in theirs, and therefore she was not alone, would never be alone, even if Bill left her, even if she spent the rest of her life weeping in her bedroom with the door closed. The world and its troubles would be with her.

“Here we are.” George had reappeared with a sponge.

Under the table, Binx could be heard sighing and snuffling.

The Wechsler boys were talking to Matthew about a biology project coming up—dissecting a sheep brain, which they said was the same size as a human brain—while Hannah and Julia giggled and made disgusted faces. Stan Melman finished sponging himself off. Naomi was now offering advice about removing red wine stains: salt, she said, while George said seltzer. Naomi stopped advising about red wine stains and, perhaps to get everyone at the table talking about the same thing, began condemning a recent vandalized holiday display. Two days ago someone had stolen a seven-foot gingerbread man from the lawn in front of the town hall, snapped off the gingerbread man's legs, and dumped his body on the steps.

“I mean, why kill a cookie? Who'd have thought to worry about that?”

Outside the dining room windows it continued to snow. All that was out there was snow. Margaret breathed in deeply, feeling her lungs expand for the first time in months. She was so glad to be in her house, at her beautiful table, with candles and shining silverware, the red walls glowing behind the heads of these lovely people. She liked them all, she liked them so much, her guests, her family, and the bright muddle of their mingled conversations, she loved that, too, all the marvelous, ordinary, perishable noise.

Smiling, she pushed back her chair, getting to her feet like someone standing up on a tightrope.

“I would like to make a toast,” she called out, conscious again of Hedy's small dark eyes upon her. “A toast to my husband, Bill.”

Everyone else stopped talking and turned to look up at her.

“To Bill,” prompted Naomi, after a moment.

“To Bill.” Margaret raised her glass. “And to all of our troubles.”

Something was not quite right about her toast, but she could not figure out what it was, only that no one seemed to be joining in. She tried to sit down again but miscalculated the position of her chair and fell to the floor. Binx shot out from under the table, barking madly, as everyone began pushing back their chairs, moving around the table to see if they could help.

Bill, she thought. Where is Bill?

But everyone was getting in Bill's way, so that he was the last to reach her. Margaret struggled to her knees, then fell over again, and lay on the floor calling out, “I'm fine, I'm fine,” as George hoisted her upright by her armpits and then, with Stan Melman's help, lifted her into his arms. Swept with embarrassment at finding herself in George's short, powerful arms, Margaret shut her eyes and pretended to pass out.

“Where's your bedroom?” George was asking Bill in a gruff voice, holding her tightly. One of her black patent-leather pumps had slipped off; the other was hanging from her toes.

“I'll take her.” Bill was next to them now; she felt him put a hand on her leg. “It was hot in the kitchen,” he was saying. “She's just tired, after being in there all day. I'll take her,” he repeated to George.

“I've got her.”

The side of her face was pressed against George's chest; his heart beat against her temple, a succession of steady, tender mallets.

“Just tell me where to go.”

“I'll take her,” said Bill, his arms now around her thighs.

He pulled slightly and George pulled.

“You've got a bad back,” said George. “Let me have her.”

For another moment they both held her, like two dogs fighting over a stick.

At last Bill loosened his hold; he gave her thigh a lingering, almost friendly pat, and then she felt the warmth of his hand withdraw. She heard Julia's voice—Julia's voice, so much higher and younger, as it was when she heard her speak on the phone—offering to lead the way upstairs. Next Naomi, saying she would come along as well. Someone else said, “Here's the other shoe.”

George shifted his grip and heaved her higher onto his chest. She could not think now of what she would say to Bill. She could not think of anything. Her heart felt huge and full of blood. George was grunting with effort as he began carrying her up the stairs, gripping her more securely, his biceps tensing around her waist and under her knees. And from somewhere close by or far away, she heard the howling begin—it was only the wind, battering the north side of the house, only the wind, the wind, the howling wind.

D
uring her evening walks with Aggie through
the snowy village, Clarice Watkins continued her practice of gazing into lit windows of kitchens and living rooms. Often she saw people sitting around a table under a hanging lamp, plates and glasses spread out before them like a deck of cards; or she saw the silhouettes of people watching wide-screen television sets on which one bright, silent image swiftly replaced another, even battles or conflagrations cheerful-looking in their brevity. She could not, of course, see into upstairs windows, but she imagined children in their baths, mothers taking a washcloth to the seashell curve of an ear; parents later washing their own faces at matching pedestal sinks in bathrooms, discussing plans for the weekend: a movie, or dinner out, something simple, that new Italian place by the river?

A peculiar wretchedness had begun to hound her on these evenings. She missed her mother. She missed Dr. Awolowo. No one knocked on the door of her borrowed office at Warren College, where she sat surrounded by another professor's books, his prayer rug on the wall and his framed photographs of Kathmandu. A silvery bloom had attacked the leaves of her rubber plant. Aggie was limping—Lyme disease, said the vet—and slept most of the day in her plaid dog bed, twitching and moaning.

Every evening she passed the Downings' house when she headed out on her walk with Aggie. Through the windows she frequently saw Julia Downing lying on one of the living room sofas, mouth ajar, reading a paperback book with a lurid purple cover that featured a pair of fangs. Opposite Julia sat her mother in an armchair, by a lamp, looking at an iPad. Behind her hung the gilt-framed corner of a seascape.

Glimpsed night after night, this pleasant scene had worsened the jittery, abraded feeling in Clarice's chest, as if a small, sharp-clawed animal were scratching at her breastbone. Her uneasiness was more endemic, more oppressive than anything she'd felt during her fieldwork in Detroit, even in Azcapotzalco. Every evening she looked in at dining room tables and television sets, at kitchens with shelves of imitation Fiesta ware plates and coffee mugs, and whimsical wall clocks shaped like teapots and cats, and her throat tightened.

None of it was what she had expected. The tables, clocks, televisions. None of it was what, without realizing, she had hoped for. Why weren't these people happier? She had counted on them to be happier. To be insular, complacent, self-absorbed. And they were—yet also restless, anguished. And strangely infatuated with the idea of menace.

It was that girl, Julia, who disturbed her most. The house was locked against the dark, the room was warm; a beautiful painting hung on the wall. Still the girl read her purple book, desiring to be elsewhere, kidnapped by warlocks, trussed and gagged, headed for a stone tablet, a virgin sacrifice. She would trade it all—lamp, painting, her own mother—for a bleak adventure, never doubting that everything would be there when she returned, would always be there, that she did not have to do more than lift her eyes from the page and it would all still be there.

Had that child not noticed the way her father looked at her friend? Did she not see her mother collapse drunkenly at dinner, then disappear upstairs in the arms of another man? Did she really believe disorder and tragedy happened in
books
?

Out on the icy sidewalk, Clarice Watkins pressed a gloved hand to her forehead. Aggie grumbled, tugging at her leash, wanting to return to her plaid dog bed. They walked away quickly, Clarice no longer stopping to peer into the lit windows she passed, except to note how many lights had been left on in rooms that were empty.

— —

Back in her own small,
spare living room, brightened by her throw pillows and a rag rug she'd bought at the Harvest Fair craft show, she sipped a cup of chamomile tea with honey and considered writing an e-mail to Dr. Awolowo, just for the comfort of typing his name.

Her head hurt. The Downings' dog had gotten sprayed by a skunk in the yard two nights ago, and a dark, greasy miasma still hovered outside, clinging to Aggie's coat whenever they came back in from a walk. A noxious film had settled on the furniture, Clarice's plates, even infiltrating whatever she made for dinner. No amount of air freshener seemed to get rid of it.

I want to go home, she thought.

Yet, paradoxically, her fieldwork was going well. In the past few months, she had received many invitations from local residents. In addition to Christmas dinner at the Downings' house, she had been invited to the Fischmans' New Year's party, a small gathering of psychoanalysts, where she met the Epsteins, who sent her an invitation to their daughter Amelia's bat mitzvah in February, and she'd been invited by Naomi Melman to a book club meeting in March, at which they would be discussing George Wechsler's novel. Yesterday Sharon Saltonstall telephoned to ask her to attend a coffee meeting with members of the Off-Leash Advisory Group and the chief of police.

“We can't just sit around and do nothing,” Sharon said hoarsely on the phone.

Two weeks ago, Sharon's old basset hound, Lucky, was standing in the driveway when he began to stagger on his short, thickset legs; by the time Sharon got to him, it was too late. People no longer let their dogs out in their yards alone. Some dog owners drove to other towns to walk their dogs. More than a few were considering moving altogether. Task forces had been organized. A Take Back the Park march was planned for when the weather warmed.
OUR DOGS AND WHAT NEXT?
read an editorial headline in last week's
Gazette
.
What have been unleashed in this town are the forces of hatred and intolerance
.
A place bitten by fear is never the same place again . . .

And yet Clarice Watkins thought she detected a waning of interest. Since the dog problem had left the bounds of anything anyone could have expected, it had become fantastical, and as a result people in Littlefield were beginning to stop thinking about it. During her morning coffees at the Forge, she continued to hear customers express disbelief that “this sort of thing” could happen in their town, but more idly now, more out of habit. One morning she eavesdropped on an elderly couple who had arrived at the café wearing matching tartan wool hats. They shared a plate of scrambled eggs and an English muffin, briefly discussed “all those dogs,” then the old lady went on to talk about her canaries; that morning she'd found one lying on the floor of its cage. The old man asked for the salt. He said the eggs were hard. They left two dimes for a tip.

The young Pakistani, Ahmed Bhopali, was wiping down their table.

“What do you make of that?” Clarice asked him, but he only frowned, like someone picking up a dead bird, and shook his head.

— —

Tonight she was attending a
dinner in honor of a Warren College alumnus, an economist whose recent book, a reinterpretation of Keynesian equilibrium models, had been getting a lot of press. The dinner was held in the college art museum, tables set up in the marble-floored rotunda amid contemporary sculptures, all alumni gifts: a two-story tower of plastic detergent bottles, a 1968 VW Bug covered with black rubber beetles, three life-size human figures constructed out of paper clips.

In a black dinner jacket and chartreuse bow tie, the economist stood beside the tower of detergent bottles, shaking hands with guests. He was a youngish man with a small chin and glossy brown hair that curled behind his ears and fell over the back of his white collar. “Thank you for coming.
So
pleased to meet you,” he said, gazing over her head as Clarice Watkins introduced herself.

Halfway through the dinner, a pinched, tired-looking woman sat down in an empty chair next to Clarice. After gazing restlessly around the cavernous room through her gold-rimmed spectacles, the woman introduced herself as Emily Orlov and said she taught Russian studies; then she remarked that
Samsa's Wheels,
the VW Bug sculpture, had cost almost a million dollars. “Meanwhile the endowment is in the toilet and tuition is going through the roof.” She took off her spectacles and peered at them for a moment before putting them back on.