The Dogs of Littlefield (24 page)

“Oh, I'm going to die,” she gasped.

“Me too,” he wheezed.

This set them off laughing once more, Margaret snorting in a way that was not becoming and George goatishly kicking his bare legs in the air. How absurd they looked, he thought. How absurd they
were
. But when they had quieted enough to notice the leaf shadows moving on the wall and hear the birds calling back and forth in the trees outside, he turned to her again and what happened next was not absurd.

In fact, it was unlike anything he could have imagined.

H
edy Fischman was turning eighty-four. No party,
she'd told Clarice. Too much fuss. As Marv always said, any fuss was too much fuss.

Since Marv died, Clarice and Hedy had fallen into the habit of having dinner together once or twice a week. Maybe just a little something, said Hedy, when Clarice had proposed a birthday celebration. Clarice bought colored party hats and pink and yellow crepe-paper streamers to decorate the carriage house kitchen, and roasted a pair of plump squabs, flavored with cumin and served with wild rice and a corn-and-red-pepper chutney. She downloaded a recording of Edith Piaf, Hedy's favorite chanteuse, as she called her, singing “La Vie en Rose.” Two votive candles on the table, a bottle of white wine.

At exactly six thirty, Hedy appeared at the carriage house door in her black velour tracksuit, reading glasses swinging on their beaded chain. She was leaning on a walking stick, little gray Kismet at her heels.

“Ah, Edith,” she cried, listening for a rapturous moment. “That
miserable
woman!”

After tripping over her little dog in April, Hedy had started using the walking stick—not a cane but a telescoping staff, the kind used by hikers and villains in spy movies. She made a humorous show of brandishing her stick now at Aggie.

Perhaps it was only the brightness of the kitchen, but as Hedy sat down at the table it seemed to Clarice that she had shrunk over the past few months, and when she put on her glasses her dark eyes became huge in her sharp, old face, as if she were staring at something astonishing.

Hedy eyed the squab on her plate and said she felt like a cat under a bird feeder, but she ate with greater appetite than usual, greedily picking the little bones clean.

They wore the party hats, silver with blue stars; each drank a glass of wine. They spoke of how no one went out walking after dark in the evenings anymore, people seemed afraid to leave their houses. The police were not doing enough. A new citizens' organization had been formed, an online group. Patrols, they were proposing. Video cameras posted on telephone poles and mailboxes.

“So much bad news,” said Hedy. “Let's talk about something else.”

For a long time they talked of Hedy and Marv's life together—fifty-two years—their trips back to Israel, a trip to Poland, their practice, all the things they had done. Blueberry cobbler for dessert, served in a bright yellow dish. One pink birthday candle stuck in the middle. Even the dogs had a treat: organic milk bones.

Just enough fuss, was Hedy's opinion.

Once they had eaten the cobbler, the two women removed their party hats gingerly, so as not to snap their chins with the elastic bands. Leaving Edith Piaf singing and the votive candles still burning, they carried their coffee through the living room, where Hedy spotted Naomi Melman's book,
The Bright Side,
on the coffee table. Edith Piaf was proof, she said, that you could indeed feel good about bad things.

Out on the little back porch, they settled into the two wicker rocking chairs, which squeaked and crackled in mild protest, flakes of white paint drifting onto the porch floorboards. Aggie and Kismet lay down on the porch between them with companionable groans and soon began to snore. Hedy drank her coffee noisily. A few minutes later she, too, was snoring gently.

Clarice rocked back and forth, looking at the laurel bushes in their bed of pachysandra and listening to the evening settling around her, to the
dee-dee-dee
of a little black-capped bird in the hedge and the rush of a car passing on Rutherford Road. At seven thirty the sky was still full of light, one of those soft spring evenings when the breeze smelled of honeysuckle and felt like silk, the air laden with promise and desire. She tried to imagine what it would be like to live with someone for fifty-two years and then, one day, to find that person gone.

Dr. Awolowo's long, handsome, creased face appeared among the laurel leaves. His dark fingers stroked his gray beard, reaching up to adjust the heavy black frames of his glasses, the lenses catching the light of the setting sun.
Clarice, my dear
. She felt his beard brush her cheek.

A firefly bobbed in the laurel bushes, winking at her between the dark leaves.

She sighed and rocked for a while longer, looking at the gray fence at the end of the yard. Tomorrow she had a lecture to give; it was getting late. She was about to stand up, to wake Hedy and suggest they go back inside, when from the other side of the privet hedge came the twang of a screen door opening and then the sound of it snapping closed, followed by footsteps.

Wood scraped against stone; two people were settling down in chairs. After a moment, voices began speaking, one male, one female, both pitched low, yet audible. It was Bill and Margaret Downing, but their voices sounded so concentrated, so reduced that they might have been speaking from inside a box.

“She can't hear us out here. She's watching a movie up in her room.”

“Well, let's keep it down. Now go on, tell me again what you said just now in the kitchen.”

“That I've been wanting to tell you. I've been waiting to tell you. That it just never seemed like the right time—you've been so depressed—”

“How long?”

Clarice could feel the pulse in her fingertips against her coffee mug. In the blue sky hung a pale, round, pitted moon, almost full. It looked strangely like the vaccination mark high on her mother's arm.

“A few weeks. A month.”

“Every
day
?”

“No, of course not.”

Hedy was awake and had put on her glasses. Clarice lifted a finger to her lips. From a distance came the rattle of the trolley, passing through the village. The voices continued.

“Are you in love with him?”

“I don't know. I don't think so.”

“So why—?”

“Why am I telling you this now? Because I want to find out if it even matters to you.”

“Of course it matters to me.”

Another long pause. Aggie moaned in her sleep. Light was slowly being absorbed into the leafy treetops as if they were great green sponges.

There came the soft sound of someone weeping.

Hedy was rocking in her rocking chair with a ruminative creak. The little bird had fallen silent, but deep in the shadows by the fence was a dry rustling, like something small tunneling through old leaves buried in the pachysandra.

Finally one of the voices began again.

“We've been married for a long time. We've gone through a lot together. You and Julia are all I have in the world.”

The other voice said nothing.

“But I'm still young enough. It's not all over for me. I don't want it all to be over for me. I don't want to be with someone who says I make him feel dead.”

A breeze sighed raggedly through the laurel bushes. Once again the firefly blinked on and off, disappearing only to reappear somewhere unexpected. Hedy's lower lip was pushed out. She was shaking her head.

This time the voices were silent for so long that it seemed as if the conversation must be over, but just as Clarice began to think of standing up they resumed.

“So I've had a little time to think. Tell me. Is it just about sex?”

“What?”

“Because, you know, if it's just about sex, I want you to know, I think it's okay with me.”

“It's
okay
with you?”

“If it's just about sex.”

Aggie moaned softly again, paws twitching.

“What do you mean, it's
okay
with you?”

The other voice did not answer.

“What are you saying to me?”

Again there was no answer. The moon hung stony white, more clearly outlined since the sky had darkened. Not a breeze, not a sound. Even the firefly had quit blinking.

Then out of that waiting hush came a low, guttural cry, a cry so bereft and abandoned it seemed hardly human. The back of Clarice's neck prickled.

Hedy was leaning on her walking stick, the rocking chair rocking emptily behind her with a sound like knuckles on wood. The dogs hauled themselves up as well and stood with their noses pointing toward the back door of the carriage house. As she got to her feet, Clarice's legs were trembling.

They made their way back inside to the kitchen, back to the pink and yellow streamers and the toppled party hats on the table, the plates smeared with the purple remains of blueberry cobbler. The votive candles were still burning. Edith Piaf sang on in her tragic, scratchy voice. They sat down heavily.

In her black velour tracksuit, Hedy was as dark as a crow. Clarice watched her pick up a shard of pie crust and crumble it between her little claws.

“Very sad,” she said at last. “They always seemed like such a nice couple. So attractive. Her especially. But as Marv always said, every house is haunted.”

Clarice nodded. Not for the first time, she wondered if Marv had actually said all the things Hedy said he said. And then she realized that after fifty-two years it probably did not matter, and also that she had the answer to her earlier question about long marriages.

They stared at the littered table. Edith Piaf was once more singing “La Vie en Rose.”

“Well, there it is,” said Hedy with a sigh. “What can you do but feel sorry? Tomorrow I must go to the grocery store. I am out of eggs. With an egg, you can survive anything.” She sighed again. “Thank you very much for dinner. It was so nice. Come, my Kismet. Are you under my chair? Yes? Little beast? Little monster? Time to put you to bed.”

Clarice stood on the front steps, watching Hedy and the little gray dog make their slow, careful passage along the shadowy driveway to the back of the big dark house. Hedy had left a light on above her kitchen door, and as she reached it she turned to lift a hand.

On the other side of the driveway, lights were on inside the Downings' house. It appeared they had gone in. Yes, there was Margaret, moving alone past the kitchen windows, pausing now at the sink, now opening the refrigerator, now returning to the sink.

“How I hate making dinner,” she had told Clarice a few days ago when they happened to meet in the driveway. Margaret was watering pots of red geraniums with a green garden hose. Emily Orlov had just dropped off Julia, who'd been babysitting for her little boy.

Before going into the house, Julia had demanded to know what was for dinner.

“Chicken stew.”

Julia had made a face like someone forced to eat sand and slunk off. After watching her go, Margaret had continued watering the geraniums, playing with the hose so that arcs of water flew in sparkling lassos into the air. That was when she'd told Clarice she hated making dinner.

“I have made dinner almost every night for fifteen years,” she'd added with a little laugh. “And no one ever really likes what I make. Sometimes they don't even notice what it is.”

Inside the carriage house kitchen, Clarice closed her yellow curtains. She blew out the votive candles and turned off Edith Piaf. She ate the rest of the blueberry cobbler and drank what was left of the wine, and then washed the dishes and stacked them in the dish rack, and threw away the party hats and the crepe-paper streamers. She went up to her bedroom and took two sleeping pills, though it was only nine o'clock, washed her face, brushed her teeth, and put on her nightgown. While she lay in bed, waiting to fall asleep, she did not think of Dr. Awolowo, as she usually did at night, or of her notes, or even of the grant proposal she was writing, but of Margaret Downing standing with her hose, making lassos of water in the air.