by Laura Zigman
Dedication
For my family: Brendan, Ben, and Lady.
And for Lisa Bonchek Adams, who really should still be here.
Epigraph
There may be situations, depending on your circumstances and the nature of the disaster, when it’s simply best to stay where you are and avoid any uncertainty outside by “sheltering in place.”
—U.S. Department of Homeland Security website
If it was once a stigma when you divorced, today the new shame is choosing to stay when you can leave.
—Esther Perel, Where Should We Begin?
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Part One: Sheltering in Place
The Sling
Well/er
Driving Teddy
Morning Meeting
The Snoring Room
Couples Therapist Number Four
The Bird on My Head
The Forehead
Part Two: Cabin Fever
Host Family
The Secret Pooper
The Arrival of the People Puppets
Therapy Dog
Inhabitancy
Escape
Off to See the Forehead
The Sleepover
Noble Journey
Leaving Early
Part Three: Bracing for Change
Michael Wasserman
Adult Braces
Walking the Reservoir
Contained
Family-Style
Making Plans
Spotlight
Thanksgiving
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Part One
Sheltering in Place
The Sling
I start wearing the family dog, a mini-sheltie, a little Lassie, in an unbleached cotton baby sling across the front of my body like a messenger bag, a few weeks shy of fall. Until I slip the sling over my head and feel a strange surge of relief run through me, a liquid narcotic from an unknown source, there’s nothing special about the day. It’s no one’s birthday, it’s not the anniversary of someone’s death or a reminder of an ancient career milestone, long gone and unsurpassed. Nothing in particular is reminding me more than usual of life’s quick passage of random moments, some good, some not so good, some very very bad, disappearing like train cars into the vanishing point of a distant horizon. It’s just an opaque Thursday in late August, a month before New England is ready to give up the thick haze of summer, a day I randomly pick to try to radically de-clutter the basement using a book everyone is swearing by. The ruthless purging of possessions to the point of self-erasure is what I’m after. I already feel invisible; why not go all the way?
I’m fifty when I head down to the basement. My son is thirteen. He no longer wears matching pajamas or explains the virtues of Buttermilk Eggo waffles compared to Homestyle, or holds my hand when we cross the street or walk through a supermarket. He no longer begs for LEGOs, pulling me into the store at the mall, pointing at all the boxes, jewels on the shelves, gifts waiting to be given.
It’s hard for me to believe those moments ever happened; that I was ever in the middle of all that love, and time, and possibility, and that now I’m not. Life eventually takes away everyone and everything we love and leaves us bereft. Is that its sad lesson? That’s the only explanation I have for why I now wear the dog; my version of magical thinking: little tiny cracks are forming inside me every day and only the dog is keeping me from coming apart completely.
* * *
Like most of the mistakes I’ve made—wearing a three-piece brown corduroy “suit” (jacket, vest, and skirt) for my bat mitzvah instead of a dress; refusing to take remedial SAT classes after repeatedly failing to crack 500 on either the verbal or math sections; telling people I don’t like carrots and squash and other orange vegetables instead of just lying like a normal person and saying I’m allergic to them; marrying Gary instead of someone else or maybe not getting married at all—to name only a few—there are so many—I consider wearing the dog to be something that happens “by accident.”
I don’t go down to the basement that day with the intention of looking for the sling a vegetarian friend gave me years ago when Teddy was born that I’d mocked but never used. Back then, I couldn’t imagine “wearing” my newborn all day across my chest in what looked like a giant diaper. Teddy had been ten pounds at birth. Hadn’t I “worn” him long enough? The front carrier, a BabyBjörn, another gift, was too complicated—so many straps; so many clasps—but the sling seemed even worse. Uncomfortable and unfashionable. Ridiculous, even. I’d taken it out of its eco-friendly burlap sack long enough to roll my eyes at it before repacking it and shoving it into the back of a drawer. Eventually it ended up in one of the big plastic containers from Teddy’s babyhood marked SAVE in extra thick black Sharpie on a jagged piece of masking tape. All caps, in case there was ever any question.
The day I descend the stairs I have the de-cluttering book’s central question in my head—whether the objects in my basement give me joy or not—to determine whether they should be kept or thrown away. So little gives me joy now that I’m afraid I’ll get rid of every single thing I’ve ever owned and end up with nothing. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Feeling empty only makes me want to be emptier. But within minutes of pawing through the first big plastic box, full of Teddy’s old clothes, I find neatly folded pajamas and jerseys and pants, all impossibly tiny, all heartbreakingly meaningful: the French-striped newborn-onesie we’d brought him home in; the tiger shirt he vomited all over at four months but that I managed to wash in time so it didn’t stain; his first pair of dinosaur pajamas from when he was three; his last pair of Batman underwear from when he was five. Each item I unfold and refold crushes me. Each time that I ask myself the book’s central question, my answer is always the same: these used to give me joy but don’t anymore, because they only remind me of what isn’t anymore.
I’m into semantics now, but I don’t have the book itself—I was too cheap to buy it and couldn’t square the internal conflict between acquiring a possession (the book) for the express purpose of clearing away possessions—to clarify whether, based on the past/present issue, I should keep or purge the things that once gave me joy but now only make me want to stab my eyes out. I blink at the sea of plastic containers, at all the buried treasure—all the best years—babyhood, toddlerhood, the preschool and elementary school years—everything before middle school—forever gone. I drop to my knees then, onto the damp musty cement floor, my hands still touching the clothes, and weep—a messy untidy unjoyful kind of weeping. I wish I could purge myself of my self.
At some point I dig around in one of the boxes for an old burp cloth to wipe my nose with. And that’s when I pull out the burlap sack with the unused sling in it. Like I said, it happens by accident.
The sight of the sling now doesn’t make me think about women in Birkenstocks and hemp pants floating through organic produce aisles with their newborns. This time, the sight of that empty sling gives me joy. It makes me want to pick it up, and hug it, and marry it. And fill it. With something.
* * *
And so, it starts slowly. One minute I’m hugging and wiping my nose with the old baby sling; the next minute I’m slipping the sling over my head, marveling at the economy of its simple design: no straps, no clasps, no ties or buckles. How many of life’s paths are forged this way—one small unplanned step toward, and away from, something else unknown? At some point I stand up. The sling hangs down below my hips. I feel like Björk at the Oscars wearing that swan.
I take a step, then another step,
wondering the whole time why I so stupidly never used the sling when I’d had the chance. All that missed opportunity for human closeness. I snap the lids back onto the big plastic boxes of Teddy’s childhood and head upstairs, the fabric swinging back and forth across my abdomen as I go. It’s annoying but not a deal breaker. I know I’ll get used to it.
Once upstairs, it doesn’t take long before I wonder what it would feel like to carry something in the sling. Something soft but heavy. Something baby-like. It’s been so long.
I scan the kitchen; consider first a clean and folded bath towel at the top of the laundry basket that could be molded into a baby-like rectangle; then a red cabbage on the counter waiting to be sliced and braised with chicken for dinner that could be the baby-head; then a few cans of tomatoes from the pantry that could be thrown in for some baby-weight. But none of these things feels right; none has the right heft; none gives me the feeling I crave of having something next to my body that is alive and childlike, something that wants to be cradled constantly and carried everywhere. Or could be convinced to want that.
So maybe that’s when the dog walks into the kitchen. Or maybe it’s later, when the dog is sleeping on the floor next to the couch, her paws twitching every few seconds and her face, in repose, looking so peaceful and calm—a rare thing for a sheltie, whose mission in life is to herd, to boss, to control—that it first occurs to me. I can’t remember. Does it matter? At some point, as the baby-simulating items go in and out of the sling, I raise an eyebrow and think: What about the dog? And then: What about the dog?
Desire blinds me. I get down on the floor and tug on her collar. And just like that, as her reluctant paws slide along the floor like a Tom and Jerry cartoon sequence, everything changes.
* * *
At first, I only wear the dog inside the house, when no one else is home. It seems harmless enough. An improvised self-care remedy that instantly works better than any psycho-pharmaceutical or baked good ever has. When school starts again right after Labor Day, I drive Teddy in the morning, then come home and pace, avoiding the stacks of bills and my work. But I can’t ignore the dog. I eye her, asleep peacefully on the floor—and try to resist—really, I do—I have a second cup of coffee, check my email and Facebook and Twitter and Instagram accounts twenty more times, knock out a few rounds of Words with Friends, try to block out the awful things the government is now doing daily. But I always give in, defeated. There is no fighting the need to take comfort in whatever form is available. I walk slowly across the house to the bedroom, kneel down in front of the white IKEA bureau that had caused Gary and me to fight so bitterly years earlier while putting it together—Gary had actually accused me of “withholding directions” to its assembly, as if I wouldn’t have done anything to cut our agony by even a nanosecond if I could have, not prolong it—and open the drawer that had once been just for sweaters I never wear anymore. The mere act of reaching blindly for the sling behind all my moth-eaten cashmere always brings instant relief.
Sure, I feel like a perv when I slip the sling over my head and stalk the dog around the room—catching her in a position where she can be picked up quickly and smoothly, like a weight lifter’s clean-and-jerk lift, before rolling over on her back, thinking it’s some kind of bonus playtime, is always a challenge. Especially when it takes three or four times before I can grab her in a surprise attack and maneuver her inside, always getting dog hair in my mouth and enduring a moment when I fear I might drop her or fall over before finding the sweet spot of the heavy sling on my lower stomach and hip.
Charlotte isn’t light—twenty pounds on a good day—and she is unwieldy sometimes, like when she wants to get out for no reason other than the fact that she’s a normal dog who just wants to be free and her paws scratch against the fabric, even though I always make sure she can see and breathe just fine in there. I usually throw in one of those disgusting dried bull penises sold in pet stores as a chew snack—a bully stick—as a bribe. I know it’s not fair for the dog to endure my obsession without there being something in it for her, too, so I always have plenty of treats on hand to get her in the sling and keep things fun.
It doesn’t take long for the dog to like it. To look forward to it. I know that might sound like wishful thinking or projection on my part, but who’s to say that even if I am projecting that the dog doesn’t actually like it in there? The two ideas aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive. I might be floridly demented in thinking the dog likes being carried around in a giant diaper, but the dog might really like it in there. Because seriously, what’s not to like? It’s warm, there are snacks, and for a few hours every day she doesn’t have to walk or sniff or chase or make any decisions of her own. It’s like a vacation, a stress-free state of suspended animation that I sometimes wish I could replicate for myself.
Those hours when the dog is in the sling are restorative for me. Like a new drug, it’s helping me taper off an old one, overlapping and masking the side effects of withdrawal. By which I mean, wearing Charlotte is helping me get through the end of Teddy’s childhood. By which I mean, instead of turning to my husband with that overwhelming sadness and longing, I’ve turned to our dog.
No wonder we’re separated.
Well/er
I wear the dog around the house while I do my “content-generating” work, writing short engagingly shallow online posts for Well/er, a health and happiness website run by a small local startup with national aspirations whose management team has a median dude-age of twenty-four. Well/er believes in tiny incremental gains in physical and emotional wellness (hence Well/er, not Well), instead of big ambitious ones: DOING JUST ENOUGH IS ENOUGH TO CHANGE YOUR LIFE is the website’s actual tagline. As a fundamentally lazy person myself, I can’t say I disagree: sometimes less is more.
There’s a bank of article ideas and suggested due dates on the content-management system (CMS), as well as an updated list of timely topics that I can pick from every morning—maintained and sent out by Eden, the content manager who is based in Atlanta and whose avatar is a blue female Avatar from the movie Avatar, even though people refer to Eden with male pronouns in email chains. Whatever. We’re occasionally supposed to “meet” via Google Chat or Skype, depending on which platform has working sound or video, but since I started a year ago our team Skype calls have mostly been without video. Which is fine with me—I’d rather not remind people of how old I am if I don’t have to, which is the unfortunate effect that staring at my turkey neck on a Skype or Google Chat call—and the occasional and deeply humiliating interruption of my AOL “You’ve got mail!” alert—has on people. I’m certain that the second the call is over all the twenty-year-olds whisper sweetly among themselves about how I remind them of their moms. I’m certain because that actually happened once before we all got disconnected.
As a contractor paid by the piece, I’m expected to submit three to four “articles” a day, each one no more than three hundred to four hundred words, written in short paragraphs and in a snappy style, nothing too taxing for our attention-span-challenged readers, but always including links to “scientific” “studies” that back up whatever dubious point I’m supposed to be making, even if the research sounds made up to me. People love neuroscience now, how it can support almost every single bad habit and instinct we have, whether it’s for spending too much money (money buys happiness if you spend it on experiences instead of things) or earning less money than you need to (income has a positive impact on happiness, but anything over $75,000 is only mood gravy), or inherent laziness (tiny changes in habits are better and easier to maintain than big changes). I’m not sure any of this is true. In the years when I earned a fair amount of money, it made me quite happy actually, no matter what I spent it on.
But that was a long time ago, when a picture book I wrote, There’s a Bird on Your Head, an embrace-your-weirdness manifesto, became a surprise cult classic and then an animated PBS television series. I’d never imagined, as an art history major in college and then in
the early part of my career when I was working for Black Bear Books, the children’s book division of a big New York publisher, that I would ever earn that much. During those good years, everyone told me I would go from success to success, that money and opportunity would keep rolling in. But they didn’t. Life is like that. It’s a series of advancements and regressions, the same tide, coming and going, giving and taking away. A secret part of me still believes the current will come back in after all these dry years. But the bigger part wakes up in the middle of the night wondering what will become of the four of us—Gary, Teddy, Charlotte, and me—if it doesn’t.
“Content-generation,” the work I do now, feels like another regression, another failure, but Gary and I aren’t getting any younger and there are bills to pay, so I pursue it with nothing short of desperation. Doing just enough is enough, I tell myself when I pick a topic, knock out a few glib paragraphs, search for the perfect gauzy stock photo of a piece of avocado toast or the silhouette of a silver-haired forty-year-old doing yoga on a wood deck at sunset, then pause to come up with a suggested click-bait headline before hitting “send” and starting another. Magic is everywhere, even in content-generation, like when fabric clogs on a foot model make the perfect visual point for your “Does working at home make you less attractive?” post. Maybe this new career will magically lead me somewhere, to the next step in my proverbial journey, to a pot of gold at the end of a nonexistent rainbow. It’s the fantasy of being saved that keeps me going.
The question of where to put my laptop since my lap is now occupied by the dog is an adjustment at first, until I realize that I don’t actually have to have the dog on my lap—Charlotte can be half on my hip and half on the bed. This isn’t an Olympic sport, after all. There are no rules, no mandatory movements or positions, no points taken off for bad form. I can make it up as I go along, just like I do with my work. “Are dogs the ultimate antidepressant?” “Can dogs ease empty-nester heartache?” Anything is possible with a well-placed question mark and an endless supply of dubious functional MRI conclusions available from a simple Google search. Any thought, question, or half-baked idea of mine can become a Well/er piece.