by Susan Wilson
She rewards him with a pat, and a tiny piece of chicken. Life is good.
Meghan
Meghan’s wardrobe has evolved to include an array of brightly colored skirts and capri pants, expensive, but made especially for ladies like her—that is, adaptive, comfortable, and paired with a growing collection of blouses and T-shirts that emphasize the toning in her arms. So when Marley suggested an away-from-the-dog-park outing, she finally didn’t have to worry about what to wear. “What do you think, Shark? The plum-colored pants with the white blouse?” There is no one in her apartment to witness her treating this dog like he’s an arbiter of fashion. She doesn’t even feel like she is joking. Shark, ever alert to her needs, sniffs each piece of clothing. “Or is the lilac blouse a better choice?” He gave the white blouse a second sniff. Sat in front of Meghan. Huffed.
“The white one it is.” So far, the dog hasn’t let her down sartorially.
As Meghan tilts her makeup mirror to apply scar-masking foundation, she gives herself a smile. A year ago, less, she wouldn’t have been doing this, this primping. One of the unexpected benefits of having Shark, of having his nonjudgmental presence in her life, has been a lessening of self-judgment, that need to measure her every action against the old Meghan, the soldier Meghan. The old Meghan would have viewed a casual suggestion to see the new exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a day of challenges, from dressing to transportation to being hampered at every turn. She would have viewed it like a military exercise, preparedness, moving from point A to point B, analyzing the components and thus building up a tension that would have quickly squashed any potential pleasure in what is, really, a simple idea. With Shark by her side, exuding his doggie Zen vibes, she looks at new ideas as opportunities to show him off.
Today, she uncaps a new red lipstick and admires the way the bright color drains the emphasis away from the glistening scar where her ear used to be, a vacancy now well hidden behind a fall of russet hair allowed to wave naturally to her shoulders, freed from the military dictum of a low, tight bun.
“This isn’t a date.” She caps the lipstick and looks into her mirror at the dog’s face poised behind her, his muzzle resting on the back of her chair. “It’s just a nice idea.” She hears the thump of tail on tile. Marley Tallman is a nice guy, a friend. A friend with whom she has a lot in common. Not just the service but also the fact that, although Marley came back from his last deployment physically unharmed, his dog, Spike, is as much a necessity to his well-being as Shark is to hers. Spike may not have to flip light switches, but she presses herself close to Marley, nuzzling his palm whenever the crowd gets a little too big, or when there is a faint metallic scent in the air. It was the first thing Meghan noticed: The dog’s attention to the man, far and away more concerned with her person than with the rubber ball, was, to Meghan, a dead giveaway that this was a partnership out of the same mold as her partnership with Shark.
Meghan’s intercom bleats.
Marley’s voice sounds rusty over the box. “It’s me.”
She buzzes the outside door open and swings the apartment door wide, backs herself up to leave room for her guests. Shark sits patiently beside her. He’s wearing his service dog vest. The minute she puts it on him, he changes. He transforms from goofball to all business.
Spike, tall, lanky, and blond, like a canine Marilyn Monroe, is wearing her version of the service dog vest. She, too, observes a professional aloofness, although her tail hasn’t gotten the message.
“It’s okay. Go say hi.” Marley fills the doorway. His last name is Tallman and it is exceptionally apropos. Outside, even standing beside her, he hadn’t seemed that large. In her tiny, uncluttered space, he looms. And he is suddenly awkward.
“Sit, please.” Meghan has two chairs, an expensive leather power recliner that her parents gave her as a housewarming gift, and a floral overstuffed chair only a grandmother could love. Meghan makes no excuse for it. It came from Carol, by way of her mother, and therefore is something of a family heirloom. Both chairs face the wall with the television and are separated by an occasional table at exactly the right height for Meghan’s use. There’s a yellow tennis ball balanced on it and a rope toy, a lamp that only requires a tap to turn on.
Marley removes his newsboy hat and lowers himself into the floral chair. “I’ve got an Uber outside.”
“Can he handle my chair?” This is better; she can meet his eye.
“Yes. I made sure.” Inside, he looks older, and she can see a hint of gray in his close-clipped hair. It isn’t the old of aging, but of being old before your time. It’s why she’s taken to bright colors, to red lipstick.
“Then I say, let’s go.”
* * *
The Uber is a Honda Odyssey, and the driver has already made room for her wheelchair in the back. She’s got her regular chair, knowing that the motorized one is impossible to get into a van not equipped with a lift, and Marley can hardly have arranged that. She pulls the arm off and slides herself into the backseat, lifts herself over, and calls Shark in to sit in the well under her feet. Marley figures out how to fold the chair and the driver puts it into the back.
Marley climbs in beside her, Spike at his feet, squeezing herself into a compact ball despite her size. “Off we go.”
“I’m sorry that it takes so much effort.”
“What do you mean? Fold a wheelchair? I know how to do that.”
“It just does.”
Both dogs pant, excited about the outing.
The guard at the museum doesn’t even try to give them a hard time about their dogs; clearly, these aren’t his first museum-going mutts. What’s hard is to ask the variety of strangers to keep back, not reach out to pet the dogs, or make kissy noises to get their attention. These are dogs at work, not dogs at play.
“If they weren’t so damn adorable, no one would want to pet them.” Marley has disappointed a white-haired old lady intent on being the one exception to their rule. “Maybe if we put muzzles on them, they’d look scary.”
“I need Shark’s muzzle as a tool. And I think Spike would be crestfallen.”
“We could train them to growl.”
“That’s an idea.”
It’s almost noon, and Meghan suggests lunch. It’s Saturday afternoon, and, as they expected, the cafeteria is terribly crowded, but no one is lingering, so a table becomes available fairly quickly. Marley moves a chair aside so that Meghan can slide in, asks what she wants for lunch, and disappears, leaving her with both dogs obediently ensconced beneath the table.
Meghan sees the curiosity on the faces of folks not expecting to see two sizable dogs in the cafeteria, and she wonders if she should have a placard that says CLEAN DOGS, WORKING DOGS. Shark rests his chin on her foot, but she doesn’t realize it until she peeks under the table. Shark is happy, but Spike is concerned and shows it with her sphinxlike pose beneath the table, her eyes on Marley in the checkout line, clearly distressed to be separated from him by even a few feet.
“Chicken Caesar salad wrap, chocolate milk.” Marley sets her lunch down in front of her.
Meghan has a ten and a five in her hand. “What do I owe you?
“My treat.”
“That’s what you said about the Uber. And the museum tickets. Marley, this isn’t…”
“What? A date?” He has the grace to smile.
“Well, yes. I mean, no.”
“Are you saying you wouldn’t date me?”
“Not at all. I mean…”
Marley is still smiling. “Is it ’cause I’m black?”
Meghan has too much experience sharing jibes with her troops, many of whom were brown-skinned people. “No. It’s ’cause you’re a marine.”
“No intermilitary dating for you?”
“I’m regular army all the way, mister.”
“Then give me twelve bucks.”
* * *
As great as the day was, Meghan is glad to be home, cradled in her power recliner, scrolling through her
Netflix choices. She hadn’t invited Marley up after the Uber dropped her off. It wasn’t a date, after all. Hadn’t she made that clear? “See you at the dog park.”
“You bet.” Marley waved the Uber driver off. “It was fun. Hope you had fun, too.”
“I did.”
She needs someone to ask the question “Why wasn’t it a date?”
Meghan hits the speed dial for Rosie.
Shark
It was the best day ever. Rides in a car, going into a place where so many people noticed him; being with his pal Spike. Everything was going along just fine, but now Meghan is in that worried funk she sometimes gets into. Sharkey pokes at her with his toys, tries to remind her that they’ve had a fun day. But she mutters something to him that suggests she is troubled. He hands her the cell phone. He’s got excellent hearing and the voice coming out of the phone is his dear old friend, Rosie. He leaves off trying to jolly Meghan out of her fret. Clearly, she needs the human voice to emerge out of it. Disappointed but not discouraged, Sharkey decides on a nap.
Rosie
Another day, another discussion. Tucker has arrived. He hands me a paper cup of coffee and we head into the house to take a look at the work in the front parlor. Two hundred years of flooring modernizations have been ripped up. It’s been like an archaeological dig, pulling up each generation’s “improvements,” from grubby worn wall-to-wall, to faded linoleum, to plywood subflooring, to the mother lode, twenty-inch-wide ship planks. “Just don’t grow trees like that anymore.” Tucker runs his hand along the planking, sighs with appreciation and with despair. The crew has excised the worst of the rotted planking with surgical precision, and the new planks, repurposed from a barn in New Hampshire, will be sistered in. But there has to be a reason the seaworthy original planks rotted. Somebody needs to go into the crawl space and take a look.
Frankly, I’m more interested in the plumbing project. “So, Tucker, when do you think the plumber will arrive?”
“Rosie, why don’t you call him?” He says this gently, but I get the point. This is my job, chasing after subcontractors—“subs,” as we call them in the business.
As if he’s sorry for mentioning my job to me, Tucker adds, “You’re okay, though, right? With water?”
“I think I probably stink.”
“I didn’t notice.”
“Really, Tucker, this constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.”
“Go to my place. I’m never home during the day. I’ll even clean the bathroom for ya.”
“I couldn’t.”
“Why not?”
I know that I must have this look on my face, a little bit horrified, a little bit tempted. “I’ll think about it.”
“Just let me know. I’ll give you a key.”
“What about your wife? Wouldn’t she be a bit surprised to find a strange woman in her bathroom?”
“Only if she deigned to visit my apartment. We’re divorced.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be.”
The day has turned nice, warm enough the mud has already gone from black to brown; the big paw prints from yesterday have hardened into impermanent fossils.
Last night, I thought I heard a dog bark. I am sleeping only fitfully, still uneasy in the deep silence that surrounds this lonely place. I woke with the same kind of startle reflex you have when you dream of falling. I woke up listening, but I heard nothing except the faint sound of wind through the woods that surround this house.
Tucker catches me looking at the print. “I’ll bring back a proper composting bin when I go up the line to the Home Depot.”
“‘Up the line’?”
Tucker smiles, “Local expression.”
Despite Tucker’s offer to go to his apartment and use his bathroom—not bloody likely—I continue to rough it with water heated on the stove, and I have become proficient in the sink bath routine. I think back to the time in my life when I might have showered twice a day, lathering and rinsing with scarcely a thought for my parents’ hot-water bill. And college, my first experience of high-flow showerheads and the wearing of shower shoes. Charles’s South End condo had all the bells and whistles one needs when one is of pampered stock: Jacuzzi heads in the tub, a separate shower with a showerhead that made it feel as if you were in a rain forest. And, of course, the communal showering in prison. Plastic shower curtains with at least three missing rings, the ongoing combat to get into the shower before the inadequate hot water ran out. The hair pulling if you stayed too long. So, hey, maybe a quiet sink bath and an outside hose for shampooing isn’t all that bad.
* * *
With only the most primitive kitchen, my kitchenware comprising two saucepans of questionable cleanliness and a slotted spoon, I opt for visiting Cape Ann’s wide array of dining options. Seafood, obviously. Italian. Seafood. Pizza. Seafood. And, my favorite, Portuguese cuisine. It’s at the Azorean, where I run into Tucker, also dining solo.
My instinct is to duck him, to pretend that I don’t notice his presence. He’s seated at a two-top table, with his back to the window, the table set for one.
“Hey, Rosie. Join me?” Without his ball cap, with a pair of reading glasses giving him a rough-hewn professorial aspect, he doesn’t look quite as ursine as he does in his natural element of sawdust and debris.
“Oh, I couldn’t.” I’m not being polite, or coy. Whatever would we talk about? I have no conversation that wouldn’t veer off into revelations about my most recent history, which I have no desire to cop to. Besides, I can’t imagine sitting down in such close proximity with any man just yet.
“Oh, come on. Unless. Are you…?”
“What?”
“Expecting anyone?”
My mama told me never to lie. “No. Just me.”
“We can go over some details.”
Whew. A business dinner. Plenty of nice neutral subject matter. “Sure. Thanks.”
The hostess quickly puts a table setting in front of me, asks after my beverage preference. I notice that Tucker has a bottle of craft beer in front of him. I order—for the first time in, oh sweet Mary Mother of God, six years!—a glass of wine. House Chardonnay. No sense getting fancy. It tastes better to me than any of Charles’s high-priced, overdescribed, fancy-schmancy imported wines. I try not to guzzle it down before my Mediterranean salad arrives. Tucker has the kale soup. I have the frango assado and he has the grilled octopus. We talk about the project in between forkfuls. I nod and agree with much of what he’s saying because, after all, I have no idea how a project of this scope is attacked. If Tucker says strip the antique shingles off and get the roof done first, then, of course, I nod in sage agreement and bring up the state of the nonfunctioning bathroom only as an aside. We agree that there must be some simultaneous inside and outside activity in order to get the place habitable by the time cold weather sets. Habitable. I laugh at that word. I’m living in an uninhabitable house. And that’s just fine.
“I’m curious,” I say, and take another bite of the amazing chicken. “What’s with Dogtown?” Tucker’s business name plus a couple of other Dogtown references have had me looking for wayfinders for a hidden village on this peninsula of villages. A village of dogs, maybe. A place I would feel very much at home.
“Ah, Dogtown. It’s an interesting story.”
“Tell me about it.”
“You have to know a bit about Cape Ann history, how the first settlers came here. Out of fear of pirates and the native population, they settled away from the coast, calling the area ‘The Commons.’ They prospered, and every man—white man, of course—had a field and a woodlot. There were a couple of mills. A nice little village. Then, a couple of generations later, the threats were gone, and the lure of making a ton of real money on the sea had most of the well-to-do gravitating to what is now Gloucester proper. The rich people left, and the poor continued to try to eke out a living on this really rocky, deforested land. All that it was really good for, after the trees were gone, was sheep farming
, and even that was hard because of the bogs.”
“The bogs?”
“Wetlands. Sheep-eaters.” He paused long enough to savor the last of his dinner. “Eventually, the houses deteriorated, and today you can see the cellar holes where they once stood.”
“But how did that become Dogtown?”
“Well, by the end of the Revolutionary War, pretty much the only people left in the Commons were widows, too poor or too eccentric to live elsewhere. They took in boarders, and the place ended up with an unsavory reputation. Needless to say, the women became known as one of three things: witches, cheats, or prostitutes.”
“And they were called ‘dogs’?”
“No, they kept dogs. The widows became known for keeping dogs as close companions—read familiars—and as protection against, well, probably against the drunken sailors who might prey on them. Some smart-ass probably started calling the place ‘Dogtown’ and it stuck.”
“Where is it?”
“Just outside your door.”
* * *
I saw paw prints again this morning. I was bent from the waist, cold water numbing my skull as I washed my hair. I saw it, and I put my hand down next to it to get its measure. As big as these prints looked, my hand was still larger—just.
Last night, I heard barking. I’m sure of it. Not distant barking, but close by. It woke me from a sound sleep. No, that’s not accurate; a sleep interrupted throughout the night, as most nights, with the taint of bad dreams. I am nearly a month beyond incarceration, and still I dream of boxes and immobility. If I am lucky, I dream of my dogs, Shark and Harry and my unfinished Lulu. I wake wondering how they are, if they are happy. Meghan has begun to slip away from our friendship. She hasn’t called as often, and she responds to my texts with a new brevity. I have to keep in mind that she is now a workingwoman, that her hours are filled in a way that they weren’t when we first met. And she’s kind of dating. Another veteran. I’m happy for her. I don’t take it personally.