by Janet Elder
Huck could not get comfortable in the car. Like a lot of New Yorkers, he’d never had a real reason to be in a car, and the trip to New Jersey was one of only a handful of rides he had ever had. I held him on my lap, and he settled a bit, but trembled for most of the forty-five-minute car ride across the Hudson River and up through the foothills of the Ramapo Mountains in northern New Jersey.
I felt a little like trembling, too. I was glad Rich was driving. I still didn’t feel entirely competent behind the wheel of a car, one of the stranger and unexpected side effects of the cancer treatments. Although my hair had now grown enough to look short chic rather than bizarre, other parts of me were returning more slowly.
At some point over the last eleven months, I had lost my ability to intuit. I found that I could not rely on my gut instincts, whether it was about what Michael wanted for dinner or which angle of a news story to bear down on. It was unnerving. I had an unfamiliar skittishness about my own judgment.
I mentioned it to my doctor, who thought it might be part of the intellectual fog that can be a side effect of chemotherapy. But I always felt it was something deeper. It was as though I had lost depth perception about life. I felt uncertain a lot of the time. I was unable to judge just how far I would fall if I made a wrong decision.
It eventually wore off, but on that cold March night, terra firma seemed hard to find. As we drove through the darkness, I started wondering if it was a mistake to leave Huck in a place so unfamiliar to him. The Clarks had a busy life of their own. Barbara commuted into Manhattan every day. Dave worked. Darian, the only one of their three children young enough to still live at home, played on assorted sports teams. Maybe I was taking advantage of their generosity. I suddenly felt more of a sense of melancholy than excitement. I shook it off.
We drove down Ramsey’s Main Street, past the stone-faced Episcopal Church with the red doors, past Veterans Park with its monument honoring World War II veterans, past the stately looking high school, over the train tracks, past the bank, the hardware store, the ice cream shop, the movie theater, and the library; past all of the symbols of the small town’s pride and fierce sense of community.
There are six churches in Ramsey. Volunteers run the fire department, and the sports teams, as well as dozens of civic organizations. The town’s leaders haven’t allowed a Gap or a McDonald’s to replace the mom-and-pop shops.
In its earliest day, residents of Ramsey grew strawberries by the railroad-cars-full and sent them to New York. The town has pre–Revolutionary War roots and takes great pride in the oldest house, which dates from that period. For much of the 1900s, there was a sign in town: RAMSEY—ALTITUDE 410 FEET—THE 3RD HEALTHIEST PLACE IN THE UNITED STATES. Makes me wonder what the first two were.
Every fall, just when the leaves begin to turn bright yellow and orange and the air is crisp, the town holds “Ramsey Day,” complete with a parade, fire engines, flanks of Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts, at least one marching band, and generations of Ramsey residents who turn out to celebrate their life there.
People like Fred Swallow, whom I once met at Ramsey Day, show up. A tall, kind-looking man, a retired barber and World War II veteran, Fred mans the VFW booth, selling white T-shirts for the post with a picture of a giant bald eagle flanked on either side by American flags and the words TAKING PRIDE IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.
Fred had gone to barber school in New York after serving in the army as a lab technician; he was stationed in New Guinea and then the Philippines, where he worked to protect soldiers from the ravages of malaria and syphilis.
One of his army buddies came from Wayne, New Jersey, and in 1948 enticed Fred to seek work in Ramsey. Fred eventually bought the barbershop in the Ramsey train station, called it Fred’s Barbershop, and stayed there for thirty-three years, raising the price of a haircut over that time from 90 cents to $7.00. It was a life he loved.
For Fred, the protected world of a barbershop in the Ramsey train station was threatened not by the advent of unisex hair salons but by the Beatles. “We had four chairs. Everything was going good till the Beatles came,” he said, looking back on his entrepreneurial days in town. “After that, the kids stopped coming for haircuts.”
But pastoral Ramsey is also the kind of place where teenagers grow restless. Even as the town celebrates its community, the police are on hand to talk to teenagers about the lethal combination of drinking and driving.
Ramsey is nestled between the township of Mahwah and the borough of Allendale. The clusters of houses are separated by dense woods, hills, and small lakes. The stillness of the suburbs is a welcome respite in the warm weather months, but feels weighty, empty, and desolate in the winter. In those months, the streets are deserted, the yards vacant. Church on Sunday is as much a social gathering as a prayerful one.
On that cold night in mid-March, Ramsey was at once welcoming and bleak. I had no particular relationship to the town other than that it was the place where my sister and her family had lived for more than a decade. Small-town life had a certain dreamy appeal to me, but I had become too ironclad a New Yorker to ever make that kind of life my own.
We pulled into the Clarks’ driveway and parked under the bare trees and the basketball hoop. Their house is on a busy street and is set back from the road by a deep lawn and a split-rail fence. There is a detached garage, with wood stacked on either side, and a big backyard, fenced in for their dogs.
I stepped out of the car with Huck’s leash tightly wound around my hand. I put Huck down on the ground, and he immediately started to explore. The air was bracing, filled with the comforting scent of fireplaces. The black night sky was a patchwork of stars.
Rich, Michael, Huck, and I walked up the stone path, past the garden with the stone that says “Dad’s Garden,” to the front door. Not surprisingly, it wasn’t locked. We walked in with Huck and all his paraphernalia. The television was on, the fire in the fireplace crackled. Barbara and Darian were curled up on the couch, under the vaulted ceiling in the living room, watching television. They were each wearing black sweatpants and tight-fitting blue shirts, which set off their blond hair. They looked more like sisters than mother and daughter.
Darian, a year younger than Michael, was thrilled to see Michael and to have Huck as a houseguest. The cousins immediately whisked Huck up the stairs to Darian’s room, where all three of them lay on the floor. Although she had not yet spent much time with Huck, Darian already loved him, in part because of her closeness to Michael. She had a talent for drawing, and on the Thanksgiving Day before Huck arrived at Newark Airport, she had sat making welcome signs for our new dog.
“You’re sure you brought enough stuff?” Dave quipped before taking the bags from my arms and giving me a kiss on the cheek. “How much does he weigh again?”
As we walked into the kitchen, Dave started explaining to Rich that he had filled in the holes under the fence dug by one of their dogs, lest Huck slip under it. Rich had been worried about the holes. Dave had also moved a boulder in front of a place in the fence where he thought there was too much distance between the bottom of the fence and the ground.
Listening to Rich and Dave talk about the fence, I couldn’t tell if Dave was accommodating our usual overwrought level of concern about things, or if he, too, was worried about Huck slipping underneath the fence. Life at my sister Barbara’s house was always more relaxed than at mine. It wasn’t just the country mouse–city mouse divide. Barbara and Dave never would have bought a second Corky as we did to protect against the loss of Michael’s most cherished childhood stuffed animal. They would have had a lot more confidence that Corky would not be forgotten in the backseat of a car or, if he was, that they’d be able to get him back, or if they couldn’t, that was okay, too.
Admittedly Rich and I watched everything in Michael’s life too closely, more likely an affliction of parents with one child than parents with three children. The difference in our parenting styles allowed Barbara and Dave a lot of laughs at our expense. Wh
en the kids were very young and we’d come for a visit, Barbara and Dave were content to have Michael and Darian play outside in the yard without parental supervision. I wasn’t. I spent all my time at the window watching the kids play. Maybe I had lived in New York too long, where venturing outside without an adult is a real rite of passage. Or maybe it was because Darian was the youngest of three children and Barbara and Dave had let go of all of their instincts to overprotect. No matter, they loved to poke fun at me.
Michael was often the beneficiary of his aunt and uncle’s more adventurous approach. One winter afternoon, when Michael was a toddler and Rich was away, Michael and I went to visit the Clarks. There was a lot of snow on the ground and Dave suggested we all go tubing down a nearby hill. I considered myself something of an expert sledder, having grown up in Connecticut, but tubing was new to me. There is no way to steer a tube. A wooden Flexible Flyer can be steered away from a tree. As far as I could tell, a tube leaves the rider no way to avoid calamity other than to bail out of the tube. Needless to say, I wasn’t a fan.
Dave said he’d take Michael down the hill. I was reluctant. But Dave quietly nudged me and, to Michael’s unending delight, Dave won out. With Michael in his lap, Dave rode the tube down the ice-slicked hill. As soon as they reached the bottom, Michael jumped out of Dave’s lap and shouted with delight, “Again!”
From the time Michael was born, Barbara had made an effort to have her own close relationship with Michael, and he loved her for it. It was no surprise that when my cancer was first diagnosed, Barbara called Michael and told him that if he ever needed someone to talk to, he should call her.
Darian and Michael had a special kind of closeness, too. When they were young and the heat of summer made the tar in the streets of New York melt underfoot, we’d get in the car and go to the Clarks. Darian and Michael would sit in a wading pool together, pouring water over each other’s head, and eat Popsicles, their faces covered with the frozen treat’s bright colors. It was such a simple pleasure, but an indelible marker in Michael’s childhood. They’d dig in the garden looking for worms, they’d chase each other around the yard, and then they’d get back in the pool.
When they got too big for the wading pool, they’d trade turns swinging on a tire Dave hung from a tree in the yard. They’d stay outside until it was dark enough to chase fireflies. On more than one occasion, Michael ran to me and said: “Mommy, I’m having so much fun. Can we come back tomorrow?” His skin moist with perspiration, his face tanned from the sun, his dimples popping, his blue eyes sparkling, he smelled of the outdoors. I’d draw him close, hoping to still the passage of time, but in a matter of seconds he was off again.
As the kids got older, baseball and a devotion to the Yankees took over. There were treks to nearby Finch Park to practice throwing a baseball and catching it in a glove, and sliding in the dirt. Back at the house, they’d play Wiffleball in the yard, giving both Rich and Dave a chance to reawaken their own ball-playing muscles.
That night, as we stood in the kitchen and I unpacked Huck’s belongings, I told the Clarks about Huck’s habits. “He goes out three times a day, but he is also paper-trained, so if you can’t take him for a walk, just put down some paper.”
“We don’t need the papers, we’ll just let him out in the yard,” Dave said. “You worry too much.”
I told him about the cream cheese. “It’s his favorite treat. Whenever you want to reward him, or even if you just want to call him, just say ‘cream cheese,’ and he’ll come running.”
Dave and Rich chatted about baseball and the games we were going to see in Florida. I paced around nervously. Barbara teased, “Would you relax? I think we know how to take care of dogs,” she said, pointing to the multiple beds of their multiple dogs. “He’ll be fine.”
I admired my sister. I had felt very protective toward her all through our years of growing up. By virtue of being the youngest, not to mention the third girl, she had gotten the brunt of all the problems of our childhood. But Barbara really didn’t need protecting; she was scrappy as could be.
Barbara had been a high school cheerleader with a penchant for drama, two characteristics that draw people to her even as an adult. She was always the energy in the room.
As an adult, she has a powerful sense of family, loyalty, and order. She is also a “clean freak,” like me, something I am sure came out of the tumult of our youth. It conveys a sense of order even when none exists.
Dave is a quiet man who is often hard to read. He’s given to small acts of kindness and always deflects attention from himself. Other than Barbara’s commute into New York for work, the Clarks rarely venture into the city.
Barbara and Dave are a perfect match. His reticence complements her high wattage. Dave has a runner’s build and a narrow range of expression. His own parents died young. Every summer he packs up his family and takes them to the races at Saratoga, something he did as a child. Dave loves to garden, play baseball, and run. He prides himself on knowing his way around a kitchen, a skill he picked up at Cornell’s School of Hotel Management. He and Barbara were married at Cornell, and they return every year to hike the rugged hills of Ithaca and to eat the meatball sandwiches sold off the back of a truck dubbed “The Hot Truck,” something Dave relished when he was in college there.
Dave and Barbara are passionate about Ramsey, the town where they have raised their children. They have each coached various Ramsey girls’ softball teams. Dave went so far as to volunteer his time to serve as commissioner of the league, which included nine towns. After about a decade of service, Barbara and Dave retired their bats and gloves. The town thanked them with plaques and invited them to throw out the first pitch on Opening Day.
Throughout the fall, on Saturday mornings, Barbara goes to the high school to help sell hot dogs and sodas at the game, engaging her fellow Ramseyites in conversations about their lives.
Barbara is the kind of person people want as a neighbor. She can be counted on to notice if you went away and forgot to close the garage door, or to pick up your kids if you were running late, or to make a pan of lasagna if you had a family member in the hospital. I knew she would take good care of Huck.
I left Dave, Barbara, and Rich chatting in the kitchen and started up the stairs to see what Huck and Michael and Darian were doing. As I got closer to the top, I heard barking and laughing. Standing in the doorway of Darian’s room, I watched Huck doing what he does best. With one paw planted on one of Darian’s cheeks, he was licking her face, her eyes, her nose, and her ears. It was as though he were holding her face with hands. “If he likes you,” Michael said laughingly, “he could lick your face for hours.”
It was getting late. “We have to leave in about five minutes,” I said to Michael.
Michael responded the way he always did when I tried to pry him out of Camp Clark, the house where all the fun was. “Can’t we stay?”
I responded the way I always did, “No, we have to get going. Five minutes.”
Truth was, I wasn’t ready to leave either. I wasn’t ready to leave Huck. I wouldn’t be any more ready in five minutes or five hours.
I went back downstairs, through the living room, pausing by the piano to look at the latest addition to the family pictures, this one of Michael and Darian at a dance recital of Darian’s. The family resemblance strong, they could easily be brother and sister. I carefully put the picture back down on the piano and went into the kitchen.
I said to no one in particular, “We’d better get going.”
Barbara put her arm around me. “Now you guys have to have some fun. You deserve this vacation. Have a fantastic time,” she said. “And please, do not worry about Huck. He’ll be fine!”
We all walked back into the living room. I stood at the bottom of the stairs and called to Michael. He and Darian came down. Looking at Darian holding Huck in her arms, I thought about how even though Huck had nearly doubled in size since the day we got him—he now weighed nine pounds—he was still a very
small dog. He was just the perfect size to hold; he seemed so vulnerable. I wondered if he would miss us as much as we would miss him.
It was time to go. I braced myself. “Bye, Huckie,” I said. I gave him a pat on his head.
Michael took Huck from Darian and looked him straight in the eyes. “You be a good boy, Huck,” Michael said. “I love you.”
Rich, too, was having a hard time. “Okay, Huckie boy. We’ll see you soon,” he said.
Rich gave Huck a hug. Michael handed Huck back to Darian. Barbara walked with us out to the car. “Seriously, Jan, don’t worry. Just have a good time,” she said.
Rich, Michael, and I got into the car. Rich immediately tried to save the moment, saying ebulliently, “Is this family ready for a great vacation?” He pulled the car out of the driveway. We drove back through Ramsey’s dark streets and back to the highway. Rich started filling Michael in on the latest Yankees trivia he had picked up from Dave.
I had a terrible sense of foreboding. I thought it could be many things or it could be nothing at all. But it was there, a dull ache, something I decided to ignore, hoping it would just go away.
When we got home that night, our apartment felt empty, as though someone was missing, which of course, someone was. Huck had been living with us for only four months, but it was already hard to imagine life without him.
The next morning, as we were about to board the plane, my cell phone rang. “I just wanted to let you know Huck is fine. He’s sound asleep in my lap,” Barbara said. “We love having him here, especially Darian.”
It was reassuring. We got on the plane. Michael and I took out a deck of cards and spent the next few hours playing crazy eights and laughing at the reruns of Everybody Loves Raymond they were showing on the plane.