by Ann Patchett
“Thank you,” I said.
“I mean it,” he said. “They aren’t the same.” Then he tipped his cap and drove away.
The next day my friend Kevin Wilson came to visit. After Kevin was out of college he used to come to my house and stay with Rose when I traveled. Since that time Kevin had gone on to get married and have a son. He’d published books and had dogs of his own. Now he crouched down beside Rose and cupped her head in his hand. He stayed like that for a long time, thinking, I suppose, about the way things used to be. “I always thought you had the one immortal dog,” he said to me.
And that was the problem, though I hadn’t known to put it into words. I had thought the same thing.
Rose died the next day, in the vet’s office, in my arms, and though she was no longer drinking water and had developed a sharp, acrid odor like a chemical burning, she still required a second injection to bump her out of life. In every sense I understood that this was her time, and that we had both been lucky these sixteen good years. I had friends who had endured their own impossible losses and they stood beside me in both the real and metaphorical sense to brace me for what was ahead. And still, when the vet came to take her from me and rested her up against his shoulder, something in me cracked. I stepped into that same river that the man in the golf cart had been in for all these years past his dog’s death, and I sank.
I want to tell you that Rose was an extraordinary dog, bossy and demanding of attention, comforting in her very presence. Famously, she first appeared in the pages of Vogue fifteen years ago. She sat on my shoulder in book jacket photographs. When she was very dirty after a run I would tell her to go get in the bathtub, and she would. She once scampered onto the headrest of Karl’s parked car, made a vertical leap through the open sunroof, and ran across the parking lot, into the grocery store, and up and down every aisle until she found us. She was loyal and brave and as smart as a treeful of owls. By explaining her talents and legions of virtues, though, I would not be making my point, which is that the death of my dog hit me harder than the deaths of many people I have known, and this can’t be explained away by saying how good she was. She was. But what I was feeling was something else entirely.
I came to realize in the months following Rose’s death, months that I referred to myself as being in the ditch, that there was between me and every person I had ever loved some element of separation, and I had never seen it until now. There had been long periods spent apart from the different people I loved, due to nothing more than circumstances. There had been arguments and disappointments, for the most part small and easily reconciled, but over time people break apart, no matter how enormous the love they feel for one another is, and it is through the breaking and the reconciliation, the love and the doubting of love, the judgment and then the coming together again, that we find our own identity and define our relationships.
Except that I had never broken from Rose. I had never judged her or wanted her to be different, never wished myself free from her for a single day. When she ate my favorite pair of underwear, had an accident on the carpet, bit my niece (very lightly and without consequence), I took her side. When we took our first vacation together to Ocracoke Island in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, Karl and I went into the ocean to swim, leaving Rose on the beach, which was the moment that Rose decided that the only thing worse than swimming was being alone. That vacation turned out to be one day long, as the next morning we were evacuated from the path of an incoming hurricane. The entire population of the eastern Carolinas loaded up their cars and drove inland. When we finally reached the venerable Carolina Inn in Chapel Hill, it was past midnight and the lines for rooms were long. I held Rose in my arms and asked the man behind the desk if we could check in with our dog. “The Carolina Inn does not accept dogs,” he said stiffly; then he added, “Fortunately, I do not see a dog.” And so Karl and Rose and I slept in a king-sized bed and ate our dinner off room-service trays and waited for the storm to pass. But had the hotel turned us away we would have slept together in the car. When I’d seen Rose swimming out towards us the day before, her little head held high against the waves, I realized there was no leaving her behind. There was never any space between us as far as I was concerned. As far as Rose was concerned, I can’t say. Maybe I crowded her, but if I did, she never let me know.
When I was in the ditch, my friend Susan told me to find old pictures of Rose, pictures of when she was healthy and young. Susan said they would make me feel worse for a while, and then they would make me feel better. And she was right. I’m not much for taking photos, but my friends are, and they sent me pictures of Rose that spanned from the first day Karl and I found her, through the last day, because my friend Debbie had come over and made a portrait of Rose the hour before she died. I bought a photo album and I arranged the story of her life. What I hadn’t imagined was that it was the story of my life as well. If you flip through the pages you see us age together, always the two of us, Rose in my lap, Rose at my side, other people moving in and out of the frame over time while my hand forever rests on Rose.
The fall of 2011 was a hard one in my neighborhood. Junior, the Cavalier King Charles spaniel across the street, died suddenly of congestive heart failure. Blue, the blind Persian cat, outlasted all expectations, and was terribly missed. When Tarheel, the black Lab three doors away, succumbed to old age, his owner came that afternoon and knocked on my door. “I need to see Rose,” she said.
I brought Rose out, wrapped up in a towel, and Linda sat with her in the rocker on my porch and cried.
“Some little dog out there has won the lottery and she doesn’t even know it yet,” my sister said to me when I told her that I was thinking it might be time to find another dog. We had waited six months before we started looking, long enough, I hoped, that I wouldn’t just be trying to find Rose again. Still, I can’t shake off the hope that we’ll find this new dog in a similar way. My husband and I go to the Internet to look at dogs late at night. We call it Internet dog-dating, but like any kind of Internet dating, we are reduced to making judgments based on physical appearances, and as anyone who’s hoping for a lifetime of companionship knows, looks are the least of it.
The story of how Karl and I came by Rose is more complicated than the one we tell, and certainly more complicated than the glossed-over version I first published in Vogue. Boiled down over the years, it became, We found her in the park, which, in the broadest sense, was true. But weeks before that, another girl had found her, a puppy abandoned in a parking lot, in a snowstorm. The girl then gave the small white dog to her sister, who thought that she could give her away at an annual Terrier Days dog festival (the logic being that Rose looked as if there had been a Jack Russell and a Chihuahua in her family lineage). Karl and I were only passing through before the event began, returning to the parking lot after a hike. We told the girl how much we liked her puppy, and that we would think about taking her, but first we had to quickly make a lunch date with some out-of-town friends. When we left the two of them in the park, I had the feeling we weren’t doing the right thing, and that anxiety gnawed at me all through lunch. This was the dog that I wanted, this particular dog I did not know and was not looking for, and once our friends had ambled through their meal, we hurried back to the park to stake our claim.
But the park was now flooded with people and dogs, people lined up to watch Jack Russells jump fences and run between bales of hay. We couldn’t find the girl, but after some time we found the puppy herself. She was locked in the arms of a blond child wearing a tutu. Beside the child was a black Labrador, also wearing a tutu. I asked the girl about the puppy she was holding but she didn’t answer. I found the girl’s mother and told her that her daughter had my dog.
“A girl gave her to us,” the woman told me. “She said someone else was interested but they had to leave.”
“Then it was a misunderstanding,” I said. “Because I told her we were taking the dog.”
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The woman started to disagree with me but hesitated, looking over at her daughter. I could see the details of her decision playing out in her head: the stained carpet, the missing shoes. They had a perfectly good dog. “I didn’t want a second dog,” she said finally. “My daughter wanted her.” If she knew I was lying she didn’t care. “My daughter is deaf,” she said.
“Let her keep the puppy,” Karl said, but I shook my head. They didn’t want a second dog. Karl looked at me despairingly, then said he would meet me back at the car.
The woman and I made our way into the crowd of children and dogs dressed to match—Superman T-shirts, Batman capes—until we reached the pair in tutus. The Labrador seemed like a very nice dog. The woman took the puppy from her daughter, and the girl started to cry. I’m sure there was something I should have said or done to be of comfort, but I had no idea what that might have been. I was with Rose now, who was my dog of all the possible dogs in the world. I moved quickly through the crowd before anyone changed their mind. When I found Karl I got in the car and locked the door. I told him to drive.
Sometimes love does not have the most honorable beginnings, and the endings, the endings will break you in half. It’s everything in between we live for.
(Vogue, September 2012)
The Mercies
LONG BEFORE ANY decisions had been made about where or when she might be moving, Sister Nena starts combing the liquor stores early in the mornings, looking for boxes. She is breaking down the modest contents of her life into three categories: things to keep, things to throw away, things to donate to Catholic Charities. Sister Melanie is doing the same.
“What’s the rush?” I ask, picking my way past the long line of boxes that is already filling up the front hall, everything labeled and sealed and neatly stacked. It is August, and the heat and humidity have turned the air into an unbearable soup. I think they’re getting ahead of themselves and I tell them so. Sister Kathy, who is responsible for assessing their situation and deciding where and when they should move, won’t be coming from the mother house in North Carolina for weeks.
“We’ve got to be ready,” Sister Nena says. She does not stop working. Her state of being is one of constant action, perpetual motion. A small gold tennis racquet dangles from her neck where on another nun one would expect to find a cross. “I won’t pack the kitchen until the very end.”
Not that the kitchen matters. I suspect that the nuns, who are small enough to emulate the very sparrows God has His eye on, should be eating more, which is why I’ve brought them dinner. Sister Melanie will be going to Mercy, the nuns’ retirement home, but she doesn’t know when. Some days she is looking forward to the move, other days she isn’t so sure. She stops and looks in the bag at the dinner I’ve brought, giving me a hug before ambling off again.
Sister Nena is certain that she doesn’t want to go to Mercy. She regards it as the end of the line. She’s hoping to land in a smaller apartment by herself, or maybe with another sister, though finding a new roommate at the age of seventy-eight can be a challenge. “It’s up to God,” she says in a matter-of-fact tone, then goes back to her boxes.
To make a generalization, nuns don’t have much experience with moving.
Sister Nena was born in Nashville, the city where we both live. She was eighteen when she entered the convent. Sixty years later the convent is gone and the few Sisters of Mercy who are left in this city are scattered. For almost twenty years, Sister Nena and Sister Melanie have lived in a condo they once shared with Sister Helen. The condo, which is walking distance from the mall, is in an upscale suburban neighborhood called Green Hills. It isn’t exactly the place I would have pictured nuns living, but then everything about my friendship with Sister Nena has made me reevaluate how life is for nuns these days.
“It’s like that book,” she says, explaining it to me. “First I pray, then I eat.”
“That leaves love,” I say.
“That’s it. I love a lot of people. Pray, eat, love, tennis. I’m in a rut. I need to find something else I can do for others.”
I guess I always thought the rut was part of it. A religious life is not one that I associate with great adventure. But now that change is barreling towards her, Sister Nena is restless for its arrival. Day after day she is standing up to meet it and I can see she’s had a talent for adventure all along. It seems to me that entering the convent at the age of eighteen is in fact an act of great daring.
“I didn’t always want to be a nun,” Sister Nena says. “Not when I was younger. I wanted to be a tennis player. My brothers and I knew a man who let us play on his court in return for keeping it up. It was a dirt court and they would roll it out with the big roller and I would repaint the lines. We played tennis every day.” Nena, the youngest of three. Nena, the only girl, following her brothers to the courts every morning of summer on her bicycle, racquet in hand.
When I ask her what her brothers thought of her entering the convent, she says they thought she was crazy, using the word crazy as if it were a medical diagnosis. “So did my father. He thought I was making a terrible mistake giving up getting married, having kids. I liked kids,” she says. “I babysat a lot when I was young. I had a happy life back then. I had a boyfriend. His family was in the meat-packing business. My father called him Ham Boy. It was all good but still there was something that wasn’t quite right. I didn’t feel comfortable. I never felt like I was living the life I was supposed to.”
What about her mother, is what I want to know. What did her mother say?
Sister Nena smiles the smile of a daughter who had pleased the mother she loved above all else. “She was proud of me.”
There would never be enough days for me to ask Sister Nena all the things I want to know, and she is endlessly patient with me. She can see it plainly herself: it hasn’t been an ordinary life. Some of my questions are surely a result of the leftover curiosity of childhood, the quiet suspicion that nuns were not like the rest of us. But there is another way in which the questions feel like an attempt to gather vital information for my own life. Forget about the yoga practice, the meditating, the vague dreams of going to an ashram in India: Sister Nena has stayed in Tennessee and devoted her life to God. She has lived with her calling for so long that it seems less like a religious vocation and more like a marriage, a deeply worn path of mutual acceptance. Sister Nena and God understand one another. They are in it for life.
The order of the Sisters of Mercy was started by Catherine McAuley back in Dublin. She recognized the needs of poor women and girls and used her considerable inheritance to open a home for them called Mercy House, taking her vows in 1831. Committing your life to God was one thing, but I think that choosing an order would be akin to choosing which branch of the military to sign up for. Army? Navy? Dominicans? From a distance it all looks like service, but the daily life must play out in very different ways. “The Mercys taught me in school,” Sister Nena says.
I nod my head. I was also taught by the Mercys in school. I was taught by Sister Nena.
“They never manipulated me,” she says in their defense. “But I admired them, their goodness.”
I spent twelve years with the Sisters of Mercy and I am certain in all that time no one ever suggested that I or any of my classmates should consider joining the order. Nuns have never been in the business of recruitment, which may in part account for their dwindling ranks. What we were told repeatedly was to listen: God had a vocation for all of us and if we paid close attention and were true to ourselves we would know His intention. Sometimes you might not like what you heard. You might think that what was being asked of you was too much, but at that point there really was no getting out of it. Once you knew what God wanted from your life you would have to be ten kinds of fool to look the other way. When I was a girl in Catholic school I was open to the idea of being a nun, a mother, a wife, but whenever I closed my eyes and listened (and there was pl
enty of time for listening—in chapel, in math class, in basketball games—we were told the news could come at any time) the voice I heard was consistent: Be a writer. It didn’t matter that “writer” had never been listed as one of our options. I knew that for me this was the truth, and to that end I found the nuns to be invaluable examples. I was, after all, educated by a group of women who had in essence jumped ship, ignored the strongest warnings of their fathers and brothers in order to follow their own clear direction. They were working women who had given every aspect of their lives over to their belief, as I intended to give my life over to my belief. The nuns’ existence was not so far from the kind of singular life I imagined for myself, even if God wasn’t the object of my devotion.
In her years as a postulant and then a novice, Sister Nena moved around: Memphis, Cincinnati, Knoxville, finishing her education and taking her orders. When I ask her when she stopped wearing a habit she has to think about it. “1970?” Her hair is now a thick, curling gray, cropped close. “I liked the habit. If they told us tomorrow we had to wear it again I’d be fine with that. Just not the thing that went around the face. There was so much starch in them that they hurt.” She touches her cheek at the memory. “It got so hot in the summer with all that stuff on, you couldn’t believe it. But if it got too hot I’d just pull my skirts up.”
It was around 1969 that she came back to Nashville to teach at St. Bernard’s Academy, about the time I arrived from California and enrolled in first grade late that November. This is the point at which our lives first intersect: Sister Nena, age thirty-five, and Ann, very nearly six.
The convent where we met was an imposing and unadorned building of the darkest red brick imaginable. It sat on the top of a hill and looked down over a long, rolling lawn dotted with statuary. It was there I learned to roller-skate, and ran the three-legged race with Trudy Corbin on Field Day. Once a year I was part of a procession of little girls who settled garlands of roses on top of the statue of Mary while singing, “Oh Mary, we crown thee with blossoms today,” after which we would file back inside and eat our lunches out of paper sacks. The cafeteria was in the basement of the convent; the classrooms were on the first floor. On the second floor there was a spectacular chapel painted in bright blue. It had an altar made from Italian marble and a marble kneeling rail and rows of polished pews where I would go in the morning to say part of the Rosary and then chat God up in that personal way that became popular after Vatican II. My mother worked long shifts as a nurse when I was young and she would take my sister and me to the convent early and pick us up late. The nuns would let us come into their kitchen and sort the silverware, which, in retrospect, I imagine they mixed together just to give us something to do. My sister and I were well aware of the privilege we were receiving, getting to go into their kitchen, their dining room, and, on very rare occasions, into their sitting room on the second floor where they had a television set and a fireplace whose mantelpiece was a madly grinning openmouthed devil whose head was topped with a crucifix. Still, in all those years, I never set foot on the third floor or the fourth floor of the building. That was where the nuns slept, where Sister Nena slept, and it was for all us girls as far away as the moon, even as it sat right on top of us.