by Laura Zigman
I wave my hand a few times too many, trying way too hard to backtrack. “Of course not!”
“Just because he’s a People Puppet—someone who likes to walk around in a big costume—doesn’t mean he’s hiding under there. In fact, the costume allows him to be more himself.”
I nod vigorously even though I’m not entirely sure what she’s talking about and how that’s possible—how wearing something that separates you from the world could possibly be considered anything other than insulation or protection or a way to hide—I should know!—and because I’ve just spied a package of Paul Newman sandwich cookies that I stupidly hid in an abundance of caution when I didn’t even have to and that could have made us actually look good, since all proceeds from his products go to charity.
“Sometimes what starts out as protective gear turns out to set us free,” Phoebe adds, looking down at my stomach area. I follow her gaze and absently realize, yet again, that I’m wearing the dog—which is almost always a complete shock, so much a part of me, like an extra limb, or a pregnancy belly, the dog has become.
“Therapy dogs are so cool.”
I laugh out loud—the demented caw of the delusional, of the perpetually misunderstood—still reeling from Grace’s awful parting words to me yesterday and the haunting threat of her possibly suspecting that Teddy could be the Secret Pooper. “She’s not a therapy dog! She’s just a dog! That I wear! Because she’s really anxious! All the time!” I lean up against the canned goods section of our fraudulent health closet and something sharp sticks into my back, but I ignore it. The nerve of someone I’m trying to help with free housing—someone barely out of college in a zebra costume and papier-mâché hooves—accusing me of having a therapy dog. It feels like an assault. I’m tempted to change my mind and clear the bad puppet-energy out of the house.
Then Glenn and her bald head appear like a flash, and I stare down at the sling, put my arms underneath it, and hug the dog toward me. I feel the urge to tell Phoebe everything—about the farce of my marriage, about having a teenager who doesn’t seem to need or like me anymore, about having a friend who’s dying, but all I say is: “Not that there’s anything wrong with therapy dogs.”
Phoebe searches my face, sees the tears forming, shakes her head. “I didn’t mean to offend you. I don’t even know you and I shouldn’t have assumed anything about you.”
I wipe my eyes and wave her away. “I assume things all the time, and even though I’m almost always wrong, it’s my guilty pleasure. I can’t help myself. Like, for instance, I assumed you didn’t get my ‘etchings’ reference because you’re so young.”
“But I watch old movies. And one of my moms’ favorite New Yorker cartoons is the one that says, ‘You wait here and I’ll bring the etchings down.’”
We both laugh until I get quiet. “You have two moms,” I say, more a statement than a question. “That’s cool.”
“You think?”
I shrug. “I don’t have a mom anymore. Or a dad. And my best friend who kind of felt like a mom is sick now. Which is probably why I wear my dog.” I stick both hands deep inside the sling, into all that warm fur, until the tears stop.
Phoebe’s face falls, and she reaches to squeeze my arm. “I’m sorry.”
“I shouldn’t have said anything. I’m just a big old Debbie Downer sometimes.”
“No you’re not. Sometimes life is just really, really sad. Like, I have a friend who’s dealing with a really heavy thing right now in his family. It’s hard to imagine what’s going to happen, but I guess he’ll just get through it, right? I mean, that’s all you can do. Do your best to survive the bad times.”
There is something so comforting in her words that I’m thrown back to the days right before my father died when I knew the end was coming. I couldn’t bear to go through the final decline—first slow, then swift and shocking—again, so soon after going through it with my mother, so for one week I just stopped visiting him in his assisted living apartment. It was the holidays, cold and dark and icy, with colored lights twinkling everywhere. I had barely seen Teddy, there had been a ton of snow, and Gary told me I needed a break before I burned myself out completely and that the private nurses we’d hired would take care of things for a few days. But I’ll never forgive myself for shutting down when his illness suddenly escalated. When I saw him next, he could no longer stand without help, and he barely recognized me. After all I had done right, I couldn’t get past what felt like selfishness for taking that short break, for not being present during that part of his descent. It nearly ruined me. A few months after he’d died, on a cold March morning when I was walking around the reservoir with Glenn and the dogs, I was still consumed with guilt.
“You did your best, though, right?” she asked. When I couldn’t even nod, she asked me again. “Tell me. Did you do your best?”
I thought back to the suddenness of his diagnosis—the reason he had been mixing up day and night was because of a tumor that had sprung up seemingly overnight in his brain like a big spongy mushroom—and surgery; the rush to get him placed in a good rehab hospital and then into a good assisted living facility that would agree to take such a short-term resident—they’d said he had a year at most, but it was exactly half that. As the dogs played in the tall grass along the path—Charlotte was still on a leash then—I thought of all the paperwork, all the trips back and forth to visit him during the day and in the evenings, sometimes taking the dog with me, or Teddy; how Gary would sometimes meet us there and we would have dinner with my father in the resident dining room, pretending that we were like all the other families at the surrounding tables, enjoying time with a healthy senior who had merely downsized from a big house to independent communal living. I thought about all the trips with him downtown for chemo, all the MRIs and phone calls to doctors, and to the insurance company, running, always running, from home to Teddy’s school, to my father, back to Teddy, then home again. Those days and months were a blur, as opaque as the white sky that March day at the reservoir. I couldn’t see past it.
“Then I will answer for you,” Glenn said. “You did your best.” When I didn’t respond, she dug her fingers into my arm. “Say it. It’s important that you say it. Because it’s true.”
“I did my best.” The words came out with my breath and hung in the air.
“And?”
“I did my best and I was a brave bear.”
“A very brave bear.”
Today, with Phoebe, I nod. “That’s exactly right. All you can do is do your best.”
“Well!” Phoebe says, half-laughing half-crying, wiping tears from her eyes. “Now I’m the Debbie Downer! Let’s get back to Nick! What else did you assume?”
I shift my weight, move my back away from whatever was sticking into it. “That he’s probably about as big of a pothead as Gary is.”
“Gary’s a pothead?”
“He’s supposed to be quitting. Again. Really soon.” In my dreams.
“Well, you’re certainly right about that,” Phoebe says.
“I am?” I feel like I should win a prize, but she just grins at me benignly. I guess this is what a normal conversation is like: one measured, appropriate sentence after another. “How long have you guys been together?”
“A year this past August.”
“A year!” I want to tell her a year is nothing, that everyone’s happy after the first year, that it’s the years that come later that will crush you if you’re not careful, but she’s staring past my head suddenly, then poking excitedly at something on one of the shelves with her unwieldy hooves.
“Frosted Flakes!” she squeals, turning to look at me, and when she does I can picture her at five, or six, or seven, her face wide open and full of joy, the way Teddy’s used to be at that age. “I love Frosted Flakes! My moms never let me have them.”
I reach for the box and beckon her out of the fake pantry into the fading autumn light of the kitchen. “I’ll let you have some.”
* * *
/>
What starts as one bowl of cereal for Phoebe turns into two (hers looked really good and I didn’t want her to eat alone), and then four, after Nick and Gary come upstairs. We finish the first box, and then Gary comes back with a second one, secreted from a high cabinet over the stove that I can’t reach and always forget is even there. God knows what else he hides up there.
“A spare,” he says, ripping open the blue cardboard top instead of slipping his thumb under the tab the way the directions say. “You never know when the munchies will strike.”
“Oh Gary,” I say. “Munchies is such an eighties word.”
“Well, I’m an eighties guy.”
“Besides, we had an agreement.” I point at Gary from across the cereal box. “No. Smoking. When. Teddy’s. Home.”
“We didn’t smoke!”
I stop, sniff, and realize he might be telling the truth.
“Edi-pulls,” Nick whispers then, giggling, takes a tiny packet out of his pants pocket, under his billowing costume, and shows it to me. “Oedipal’s Edibles.”
I take that as my cue to start the conversation about logistics; the when and how of their stay—three weeks, starting Friday; going through the week or so after the end of Inhabitancy, which would put us into mid-November; how they’ll stay in the snoring room in the basement and use the bathroom and shower on the second floor.
“You’ll share Teddy’s bathroom.”
“I’m sure he’ll love that,” Nick says.
“It’s good for him,” Gary says. “He’s an only child. He needs to learn to share.”
* * *
After the cereal and after the tour, after we’ve forced Teddy to come out of his room to say “goodbye and see you soon” to the People Puppets, Gary and I walk Nick and Phoebe to their car, parked at the end of our driveway, right behind the Volvo—a People Puppet Theater minivan—the kind I’d refused to buy when Teddy was small—with nylon animal hooves on the roof that inflate when the van is in motion. Nick presses his key, and when the side door slides open, he climbs in and stands, almost upright, in the middle of all the seats and cup holders and boxes of theater gear. Then he bends down and reaches into one of their costume cases—a big trunk with a fake padlock on it just for show.
“Now, here’s something I think Gary would love,” he says, pulling out a huge white sheet with a hooded beak attached. He gathers it up, hops down out of the minivan, and holds it up against himself, striking a pose. “‘Free Bird.’”
Gary stares at him. “No way.”
“Way!”
Gary looks at me, then at Nick. “I love Lynyrd Skynyrd!” he laugh-cries. “How did you know?”
“I just had a feeling!”
“He’s very intuitive,” Phoebe says.
“Try it on!” Nick says, pushing the fabric on him.
“No. I couldn’t.”
“He really shouldn’t,” I add, remembering the massive Chuck E. Cheese panic attack.
“It’s just fabric!” Phoebe says, reassuringly. “No one ever got hurt by a little fabric.”
“You have no idea,” I say under my breath, but she ignores me, moves over toward Nick, and helps him put the costume over Gary’s head. What I assume is a panicked struggle to resist—arms jutting out, then up, hands pawing frantically at the claustrophobic hooded beak—to keep the costume off—turns out to be an excited effort to get the costume on. I know this is happening because Gary is high, but even so, I can’t help but cheer him on. “Go, Gary, go!” I mutter under my breath so as not to put too much pressure on him to be successful. “You can do it!”
Draped in white, and looking remarkably like a giant bird, Gary is triumphant on the sidewalk, taking a few steps forward, then back; his wings flapping, billowing in the chilly late-afternoon wind. Dying for a glimpse of himself, he races over to the minivan windows and strikes a pose, then turns to us. Phoebe snaps a few photos with her phone, which she shows to Gary. He has a little trouble focusing his eyes under the big head, but once he does, he erupts.
“I love it!” he laugh-cries again, then hugs himself with his wings.
“It’s yours, dude. Keep it.”
Gary gasps. “I couldn’t possibly.” Then: “Really? Can I?”
“I made it myself and I want you to have it.” Nick nods meaningfully, and the puppets get into the front seat of the van. The engine starts and the side door slides shut.
Gary looks down, smooths the folds of fabric with his hands, shakes his head. He’s too profoundly moved to speak. There may or may not be tears in his eyes. And in mine, too: even though he’s doing this with the help of cannabis, his exuberance melts me.
“We’ll be in touch,” I say, for both of us.
They back out slowly, then wave as they drive down the street, the nylon hooves catching air and dancing on the roof of the minivan.
Gary watches in awe, waving wistfully until they’re completely out of sight.
“I love that guy,” he says. “I could really learn from him.”
“Learn what?”
He shakes his head. “I have no fucking idea.” He pauses. “Maybe we can be friends with them.”
Clearly the edibles are talking again. “But you don’t want friends. And you hate people.”
He stares at me, mouth open, disbelieving. “They’re not people, Judy,” he says, seriously, reverently, ridiculously. “They’re puppets.”
Therapy Dog
If I’m honest, which for some reason I hate to be when it comes to the dog, I’ll admit that Charlotte’s true origins were indeed as a therapy animal—for Teddy. We got Charlotte when Teddy was eight, around the time his sadness about being an only child and losing both of his grandparents began, or, intensified.
That year, having just started Morningside Montessori, having lost the few friends he’d made in public school as well as the comfort of a place and routine he knew—even if that school didn’t know what to do with him, and now, in its sudden absence, it was loved and missed beyond expectation—a sense of being alone in the world consumed him. He saw people only in terms of the shape and size of their families: specifically, whether or not they had siblings. Which most of them did. And he did not.
The few only-children we knew—born to couples who had, like us, started late and had decided to stop at just one—were our salvation, until each went back on their assurances to us that they would not have another child and all the other only-children in Teddy’s universe became older siblings. The semicomical betrayal we’d feel when, over dinner, the announcement would come—Sorry! We’re pregnant!—and after the baby itself arrived, that betrayal would turn on the fulcrum of Teddy’s heartbreak. Becoming a sibling was a magical occurrence bestowed on other people but not on him, a fact that deepened the divide between him and the rest of the world, proving time and again to him that happiness was for other people, not for him. It was then that he started looking at the world with a sad hunger, a longing, a deep wish to be connected, to join, to be accepted into the arms of a big noisy happy family. Which we’re not. Because we’re just three. And three never felt like enough. It didn’t when I was growing up. And it doesn’t now.
Everyone else is lucky, he’d say. They have siblings.
I know, I’d say.
I really want one.
I know, I’d say again. Because I did know. I knew the longing, the solitude, the unbearable quiet of living in a house with no other children. And I also knew that I was too old to have another baby, because I was already almost too old when I’d had Teddy.
Sometimes we’d be driving when he’d talk about wanting a sibling—he’d be in the backseat because he was too young still to sit up front—on the way back from a playdate toward home, and a thick foggy sadness would creep into the car from the inside out. Sometimes we’d be in his room at night, me sitting on the edge of his bed and rubbing his back and talking to him about his day—a routine that is still in place, even now, despite all my complaining about the distance betw
een us during the day, in public.
Sometimes it would be right after he’d come in for the night after playing all day with the kids on the street. He’d walk inside alone at dusk, and I’d catch him taking one last look over his shoulder to see everyone else paired, two by two, going home together for baths and dinner.
Sometimes, like when we’d leave from a visit with Gary’s mother and sisters in New Hampshire—cousins and dogs spilling out into the backyard, all the kids in shorts swatting at mosquitoes, their bug spray and sunscreen long since worn off—there wouldn’t be words at all. I’d see his face, full of joy at being part of a whole—at having a place in a big family—that feeling of fullness that comes from being in the midst of all that energy and activity, of all that life—right before it would fall, cheeks and eyes and mouth changing shape, dissolving, caving into itself like a dying flower.
It was always a cruel tearing away; his weeping would last almost an hour into the drive, when the crying would finally stop and the struggle between what he wanted and what he couldn’t have, would never have, turned to silent resignation and to two unassailable beliefs:
Things will never change. I will always be alone.
Or, maybe those were my beliefs, projected onto him. If I’m being honest. I hated leaving, too—returning to our quiet world of three always felt like a punishment for something I’d been accused of long ago and didn’t even do.
That’s when Glenn suggested we get a dog. Why we ever thought a dog—just a dog—one simple animal—could fill that black hole, that dark space, for Teddy, I have no idea, but many people besides Glenn, including a psychiatrist we’d consulted about his learning issues, and Gary himself, who’d grown up with dogs, all thought that was the answer to our problem. I didn’t grow up with animals, but Gary and Glenn swore it would help. Sure, we’d end up walking the dog and feeding the dog and training the dog and playing with the dog—no matter how much we’d try to teach Teddy the responsibility of pet care, Gary had warned—but it would be a long-term companion, a provider of love and affection, a protector against loneliness and sadness and grief.