Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
Even Ariah cried, in terror of losing Zarjo. On this raw, awful occasion, it seemed that Ariah was allowing tears.
Ariah, panicked and pale with emotion! Grief, shock, a wild look in Mom’s face, and her dull-red hair unplaited, messy. On the telephone, her voice rising, pleading. We had never seen our mother in 446 W
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such a state and we were frightened of her and our fear of her and for her was mixed with our fear that Zarjo was gone, we would never see Zarjo again. We had not known how we loved the feisty little dog and now our love for him hurt like acid clawing at our flesh.
Ariah’s piano students rang the front doorbell and one of us went to answer, explaining our mom isn’t feeling well, she’s got a bad headache and is lying down, she says to practice the same as last week and she’ll see you next week, she says she’s sorry.
This terrible time. At first Zarjo was missing for just part of a day and then Zarjo was missing for an entire day and then for a day and a night (except none of us could sleep, we kept vigil for Zarjo on the front porch believing he might wander home in the night ravenously hungry) and at last Zarjo was missing for forty-eight hours and our tears were depleted, or nearly. We roamed ever farther from home, in concentric circles fanning out beyond Veterans’ Road, beyond the high school, the hospital, crossing Sixtieth Street and into a zone of fierce citrus-flamey smells that stung our eyes more cruelly than salt tears had done.
Zarjo! Zarjo! Where are you, what has happened to you,
please come home.
None of us thinking whose puppy Zarjo had been. Who had brought Zarjo into our lives. None of us uttering such a fact aloud.
We were shameless ringing doorbells. Showing the wrinkled snapshots again. Interrupting women vacuuming their houses, nursing babies, watching TV. Strangers’ dogs trotted eagerly to us, sniffed our extended hands.
Zarjo! Take us to find Zarjo.
Of the children, Juliet cried the most. Helpless, hopeless, her little-girl heart broken.
“Honey, don’t cry. It doesn’t help a thing. It just tears at us all. If crying helped, we’d have Zarjo back by now.”
There was Ariah bravely trying to maintain some semblance of calm. Ariah, the mother. The responsible head of this unmoored abandoned near-destitute family living in a crumbling rowhouse on Baltic Street. Oh, Ariah wanted to be strong, stoic, a model for her children in this time of anxiety.
One of us found her lying half-dressed on her bed. Thin white arms shielding her face. Saying in a slow halting voice she didn’t
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know what was wrong with her, she was so tired, could barely lift her head.
If Zarjo doesn’t come back I don’t want to live.
Later, Ariah would deny having said such a thing.
Later, Ariah would deny the hysteria of these hours.
Her children were discovering the remarkable friendliness of certain of their neighbors. In fact, most of their neighbors. And strangers, too.
Come in, sit down, you’re not interrupting us at all, we know what it’s like, losing a pet you love. This is the dog? Sweet little thing.
Zar-jo? That’s an unusual name, a foreign name? We haven’t seen him I guess but we’ll keep an eye open, I’ll put your telephone number right here, sure I can’t get you anything? No?
An older woman on Ferry Street took us into her grassy back yard where among tangled briars and wild-growing sweetpeas there was a cemetery for her lost babies. Bobo, Speckles, Snowball, Laddie. Each had a grave marker made of birch wood and their names had been burnt into the wood with her son’s wood-burning equipment. When Laddie died, a beautiful long-haired tortoise-shell who’d lived to be seventeen and had shrunk to half his size, she’d decided she could not bear to have another pet, it hurts too much when they leave us.
But
this is my quiet place. Here, we’re all at peace
.
We ran home. Zarjo was still missing.
Ariah was still lying on her bed. Her eyes were open, vacant.
Chandler was beginning to be frightened. It would be Chandler who’d have to call the emergency number.
H-Hello? My m-mother isn’t
well I guess. My m-mother needs help I guess?
Juliet snuggled beside Ariah who was breathing hoarsely, mouth agape. Juliet, four years old, was yet a baby eager to press against Mommy, arranging Mommy’s floppy arm over her. Shutting her eyes and sucking her thumb pretending she and Mommy were napping together the way they used to nap together a long time ago.
And there was Royall, why did Royall run downstairs and slam a door, shutting the smallest finger of his left hand in the door so that he cried with pain, whimpered and moaned with pain, why did Royall feel he was to blame that Zarjo was gone, had Royall tied him carelessly to the clothesline in the back yard? Had Ariah cried at Royall 448 W
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It’s your fault, you were the last to see him, I’ll never forgive you, I will send
you away and never see you again.
Next morning, Zarjo returned.
Gone for nearly three days, but we’d never know where. We were weak with happiness! Hearing Zarjo bark in nervous excitement, a harsh staccato bark new to him, and when one of us stroked his ears he turned and snapped as Zarjo had never done before so almost you could think
This isn’t Zarjo, it’s a strange dog
. Yet a moment later Zarjo was himself again, whimpering with love and licking our hands and faces desperately. We took turns lifting the squirming dog and kissing his warm pug nose and even Ariah who’d been dazed and slow-moving revived and tried to open a can of dog food but her hands trembled so badly, Chandler had to take over. And fresh water for Zarjo’s red plastic water dish. The dog’s fur was snarled and muddy and his eager thrashing tail was stiff with burdocks and a wicked smell of tarry sewage lifted from him as if he’d been rolling in filth, Ariah insisted that we wash him, immediately we must wash him to get the stink of death from him, and so we did, in a laundry tub carried up from the cellar and into the kitchen, and while shampooing Zarjo’s fur we discovered that the pads of his paws, though tough as cartilage, appeared to be burnt, as if he’d had been prowling in chemical waste, Zarjo whimpered and shrank from our touch initially so we were fearful he might bite us but after a while he grew calmer, his paws soaking in the warm soapy water, we rinsed him, gently we lifted him from the tub dripping onto outspread sheets of newspaper on the floor, we squatted beside him wrapping him in a big beach towel and in gratitude Zarjo licked our hands again, especially he licked Ariah’s hands, and within seconds he sank into a merciful sleep, a harsh labored sleep, a sleep of exhaustion; collapsing onto his side, with his wet, slick fur he appeared a skeletal creature, shivering and whimpering in his sleep, deeply unconscious as if comatose.
In this way, Zarjo was returned to us. Ariah would claim never to have been seriously worried. She laughed at us, chided us. “You babies! I told you, that damned dog would come back. He wandered off,
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and he wandered back. And if he hadn’t, it would be no great loss.
He’s just a mongrel. He won’t live forever. Caring for a pet is like pouring money down a rat hole, you’d better wise up, life breaks your hearts, next time it will be the real thing, he’ll be hit by a car or poison himself or drown in a bog and I don’t want you ridiculous children bawling and sniveling and hanging on to your mother, I won’t hear of it,
I’m giving you warning
.”
19
T h i s m i s m atc h e d c o u p l e !
Abruptly in the summer of 1978 they began to be sighted together: the six-foot-two hulking shaved-headed Bud Stonecrop, high school drop-out and cook at Duke’s Bar & Grill, and sixteen-year-old Juliet Burnaby, the daughter of the late Dirk Burnaby. The broodingly silent young man and the dreamy high school girl with the beautiful alto voice. They were observed driving together in Stonecrop’s battered black Thunderbird, and they were observed walking together (not holding hands, and not much talking) on the windy bluff overlooking the Niagara River, and on the sandy beach at Olcott, thirty miles away on Lake Ontario. They were seen at odd hours at the movies, often mid-afternoons. They were seen at local malls, improbably shopping together. (New clothes for Stonecrop? Suddenly he began to wear sports shirts instead of exclusively T-shirts. In the pitiless heat of summer he consented to wear khaki shorts and sandals instead of his usual long pants and ankle-high sneakers.) More than one woman neighbor of Ariah Burnaby dared to knock at her door to inform her that her daughter was seeing “that Stonecrop boy, from that Stonecrop family on Garrison.” White-lipped Ariah listened politely to these informants and murmured, “Thank you!” without inviting them inside.
(Did Ariah speak with Juliet? She did not, dared not. The news of her daughter seeing a boy, any boy, let alone a dangerously hulking Stonecrop boy, filled her with terror, but she was shrewd enough to recall the mutinous emotions of her own adolescence; she knew how a well-intentioned parent could inadvertently stoke such emotions to a 450 W
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frenzy by saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. And there was the likelihood, as Ariah consoled herself
Whatever it is between them
won’t last long. It never does.
)
Melinda Aitkins, a nurse at Grace Memorial Hospital, with whom Chandler was now reconciled, and deeply in love, hesitantly reported to him that she’d seen a girl who very much resembled his sister Juliet in the company of “a brute-looking guy twice her size.” She’d seen this mismatched couple at the Niagara Mall gazing into a pet shop window at a litter of gamboling kittens, not speaking but just standing there, not quite side by side, but together. Quickly Chandler said that the girl couldn’t have been his sister, Juliet was too immature and too shy around boys to date.
Royall’s friends began to report back to him having seen the mismatched couple, which aroused Royall’s alarm and disapproval.
Stonecrop! The son of the NFPD officer who’d been retired from the force under the kind of vague sullied cloud that had accompanied Dirk Burnaby to his death, and beyond. When Royall asked Juliet about Bud Stonecrop she blushed guiltily, and looked away, and said in a small, stubborn voice, “Bud is my friend.” Royall was livid. “ ‘Bud’
you call him? ‘Bud’? ‘Bud is your friend’? Since when? For Christ’s sake, Juliet, Bud Stonecrop is—” Royall searched for the precisely defining word but failed to find it, as if Stonecrop stood before him jutting-jawed and glaring. “—a Stonecrop. You know that family.”
Juliet said, still not meeting Royall’s eye, “Bud’s family isn’t my friend. Just Bud.”
Just Bud.
Even in his state of aroused dread, Royall detected a tone of tenderness here.
Juliet said, “Bud isn’t what people think. He’s shy. He’s quiet.
He’s happiest cooking for people intelligent enough to appreciate it. And he respects me, and our family. Not like other people who scorn us.”
“Our family? What the hell does Stonecrop know about our family?”
“Ask him.”
This was a remarkable answer, from Juliet. Royall sensed his sister’s alliance with the other, with Stonecrop. Hotly he said, “He’s too
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old for you. You’re too young for him. He sleeps with women older than he is, he picks up in his uncle’s bar.” Royall’s breath was coming fast, he felt a choking sensation in his chest. None of Ariah’s children was comfortable speaking of sex with one another, though they were living in the most giddily sexually liberated decade in American history; or so it was believed. A fierce blush came into Juliet’s face. She said, stammering, “Bud doesn’t ask anything of me—he isn’t like other guys—he isn’t, probably, like
you.
”
Royall said, hurt, “What’s that mean?”
Sleep with a girl, give her a ring, break the engagement and break her heart.
“We’re talking about you, Juliet. Not me. Come on!”
“You want to know about Bud, well—you can’t know Bud. He isn’t what he looks like. And if he doesn’t want you to know him, you can’t.”
“Bullshit.”
But Royall wasn’t so sure. It alarmed him, how unsure he was.
And how emotional: like Ariah, years ago, flaring up into a mysterious “fugue” state and lashing out at her children.
Juliet said, in her still, stubborn voice, “Bud is like someone I’ve known all my life. Someone I can trust. He’s—my only friend.”
Now Royall was hurt, and baffled. Protesting, “Bud is not your only friend! I’m your friend, Juliet, and I’m your
brother
.”
20
Between us there’s a secret
.
We have something in common, you and me. That will never change
.
Stonecrop never spoke so directly. Yet Juliet understood.
The shaved-headed young man communicated as much in phrases of silence as of speech. In mumbled asides, grimaces, shrugs, grunts.
He sighed, he scratched his stubbled head. He was forever tugging at the ragged collar of a T-shirt, as if his baggy clothes were too tight.
His smiles were cast sidelong, with the air of one uncertain that a smile from him was welcome. There was eloquence in Stonecrop if you knew how to read him. There was subtlety in his soul however clumsy; tongue-tied, and menacing he appeared to others.
Allowing Juliet to know on that first morning they were together, 452 W
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when he’d carried her bodily away from The Falls and into his Thunderbird speeding north and out of the city
We have something in
common you and me
.
We always have. We always will. That will never change
.
By midsummer Stonecrop began bringing Juliet home with him to the sprawling gray clapboard house on Garrison Street. In a neighborhood of faded brick-and-stucco rowhouses, the Stonecrop house stood out like a beached ocean vessel. The broad front yard was mostly grassless, and littered. Stonecrop had tried to keep it clean—