by Lynn Darling
Marriage to a man with an innate love of an organized life had changed all that—at least cosmetically. Our clashing attitudes could have led to an instant divorce, but housekeeping was never really an issue—Lee was a man with a quiet but indomitable force of will. I think he simply intimidated our home into staying orderly.
After he died, however, the old ways returned, and in time the apartment in New York was in shambles. I had meant to make a fresh start in Vermont, but the simple process of unpacking a box was enough to make my heart race with anxiety. Every item that I unearthed—an old grocery list in Lee’s hand, a pair of socks I’d worn when I went into labor, a crayoned drawing of Simba from The Lion King—became a totem, at once sacred and mocking. That’s when I would break down, filled with grief, yes, but also fury. I could see that the mess wasn’t simply the product of my lifelong laziness or some outdated adolescent protest. No—I was drowning in the past, the artifacts of loss fossilizing around me. By never letting go of anything, no matter how trivial, I was dismissing the future, allowing it no room in which to unfold. No wonder cleaning up caused me such anxiety.
And yet I couldn’t do it. The house developed claws and fangs and ripped away any notion I had of gaining purchase, and I would slide fast into the old grief, past any sense of purpose. Defeated, I would creep downstairs, curl up on the sofa, and listen to Emmylou Harris, too tired to do anything, too empty to feel guilty about it. “Hold on,” sang Emmylou, but I couldn’t, not very well. I tried to think of a reason to live, not in a melodramatic way—as George Eliot said, suicide is attractive only to the young, and besides, there was Zoë to consider, Zoë who had recovered so well from her father’s death, but who just the week before had called the Woodstock sheriff and convinced him to drive out to Castle Dismal to make sure I was still alive. (The phone was dead, and she hadn’t been able to reach me.) No, this was a question asked of the future. If Zoë was all but gone, and writing was too frightening, and love a distant memory, what was I going to do with myself? How did one invest this part of life with meaning? Now what? I didn’t know, and Emmylou didn’t say.
Every night I promised myself I would climb out of this trough and get back to work, and late every afternoon I would discover to my great surprise that I had done nothing at all. Instead I knitted—I was making a red throw for Zoë’s room in college—and while I knitted, I thought about what I would write when the throw was finished. On the computer, I played endless games of Boggle and Word Whomp, a word-scrambling game in which animated gophers poked their heads out of holes. When you failed to find the big seven-letter word in the allotted three minutes, they shook their heads in disappointment, but when you got it right, they would do backflips and ecstatically munch the turnip awarded as your prize. I loved making them happy.
The word games were the closest I got to writing. Some of the words I unscrambled would hook me with their inherent beauty or the chime of some subconscious resonance. Sometimes I would write them down—gaunt, goblin, bramble, languor, dwindle. I played for hours, until my fingers hurt. Then I would go on the Internet and research addiction to computer games, looking for symptoms of how badly I was hooked, until at last the rooms began to darken and the day was down for the count.
I don’t know how long this state of suspended animation would have lasted if the ceiling in the mudroom hadn’t caved in. One morning I woke to find fluffy balls of acid pink insulation drifting through Castle Dismal. I wasn’t worried about them so much as I was alarmed at the idea of armies of mice pouring through the breached ceiling to complete their final conquest of the house. I called Larry Davis, the contractor who had done some earlier work on the place, and we agreed that it might be time to look toward some of the other repairs that had long been in the offing—a roof over the garage to keep the snow off, an enclosure for the solar battery, a new shed for the woodpile, a set of stairs down from the door that currently led nowhere, a rerouting of the electrical wiring that was housed in a giant column in the middle of the kitchen, making it impossible to see from one end to another. A crew would arrive on Monday.
I told myself that it was a terrible imposition—the noise and the dust and the bulky presence of strangers would keep me from writing, and I did a pretty good job of pretending to resent that fact. But of course it wasn’t true. I was sick with lack of work, with not even knowing where my winter clothes were. I had two days to make room for the men and their equipment. The mudroom had to be cleared of its maze of boxes, and by the time they arrived, I had finally made a dent in setting up a kitchen, and filling a bedroom closet, and clearing a tentative space for books and papers.
There were four of them: Mike, young and handsome, a high school football star who had turned to drugs after an injury sidelined his dreams, only to sober up at eighteen when his girlfriend gave birth to their son. Calvin, his stepfather, small and strong and wiry, in his sixties, pared down by the race life had run him, but observant, weathered, a stealth wisdom playing in his eyes. Hank, gap-toothed, bashful, taking refuge in hammer and nail and the sense they made out of everything. Jimmy, round-faced, potbellied, a little lazy, hiding it, or so he thought, behind an easygoing temperament.
We were elaborately polite to one another for a day or two, making wide berths in the course of our passing, until one afternoon I sneezed—I make china rattle when I sneeze—and Mike, who was on the roof, sang out, “God bless you!” and I shouted a thank-you and we all laughed. Then it was easy and the house rang with the noise they made, and vibrated with their energy and the authority they brought to bear on the obdurate house, pounding, sawing, and thwacking it into submission, chasing away the wretched silence. They worked hard, those men, and their energy shamed me into trying a little harder.
While they worked, I would settle down to read, but instead I listened to the talk about lives so different from mine. They talked about women—Mike was moving into the trailer with his stepfather and his mom; he and his girlfriend weren’t getting along. He worked days, and she worked nights so that one of them would be with their son, but they never saw each other. And the coming hunting season—the winter had been hard and the deer scarce and the freezer still needed to be filled if they were going to make ends meet. How stupid my inertia would seem to them, if I were to join the conversation: “Well, my daughter left home, you see, and I don’t know who I am now, and the days fit like a coat three sizes too big …” It would sound like Urdu.
A few weeks before the men had arrived, I had brought home the puppy I had contracted for in the spring, in New York. He was a fat ball of fluff, with a big head and no shape to speak of, and his hair was so white and thick he looked more like a baby polar bear than anything else. A dog had always been an essential element in the full Fortress of Solitude fantasy. I had planned to name him Carlo after Emily Dickinson’s dog. Like Dickinson (before she became a recluse), I would wander the country with only my dog for company, and I would write great things that no one would see, and be at one with nature.
But if I was no Emily, the dopey little pile of sleep I had brought home from New Hampshire was no Carlo. He had, to the extent that he had any expression at all, a mild, unintelligent look, as if he might grow up to be a docile country curate, the poor, unambitious kind who yearns after the pretty girl in Victorian novels. Henry, I decided. He was a Henry.
So far our life together had been rocky. I’m not sure what had possessed me to get a dog—I had once had a wheaten terrier, and it had been a nightmare. That decision had been equally well thought out—Zoë, aged six, had lost a beloved stuffed dog, and coming so soon after her father had died, the loss loomed large; it seemed imperative that I go out and immediately buy her a real one as a replacement. The result was a turbocharged, highly aggressive puppy in the hands of an incompetent and unmotivated owner who thought the creature’s crazed disposition was kind of cute until she wreaked absolute havoc in the apartment, as well as on my friendships. Two threatened lawsuits and three trainers later, I was
told by the last one in no uncertain terms that the dog was too nuts to live in a city, and so Rosie went off to live on a beautiful farm in Vermont, where she has lived happily to this day.
Henry would be different.
Henry was different: Henry hated me. It had been fine the first few days, when he would fall asleep next to his food bowl and I would carry him to the sofa and hold him while he napped. But then he woke up.
Henry didn’t want to play with me. He didn’t want to cuddle or for that matter be touched. He didn’t like any of the pile of educational toys I bought him. He ignored all my attempts to house-train him. We would walk around the front yard for hours—at dawn, after every meal, in the middle of the night—while I encouraged, pleaded, threatened, and begged him to do what he needed to do, without result. Then he would toddle back inside and shit on the floor. When he wasn’t comatose or incontinent, he was half shark, shredding magazines and furniture and shoes and electric cords. Most of the time, I didn’t even have the will to stop him, so completely oblivious was he to my presence. Except once.
I remember that day because it was one of those moments of rare insight when you realize just how crazy you have become. It was late on a hot afternoon, another day of getting nothing done. The sun was just beginning to disappear over the ridge, for which I was grateful—it was the hour when the fury at myself for doing nothing and the anxiety that prevented me from doing anything about it finally dissolved into a promise that tomorrow would be different. It was always a tricky transition, however, and sometimes the lie didn’t take—I knew that tomorrow wasn’t going to be any different, and I would spend the evening writing long journal entries about what a failure I was while listening to old Cowboy Junkies albums.
But that evening, I was simply relieved to have the day done, and I went outside to sit on the stoop and play with the sad-faced puppy. He was worrying a bone I had given him earlier and ignoring me and my efforts to interest him in a game we could play together. So I decided to take the bone away—a move, had I known anything at all about dogs, I would have executed with extreme caution (if at all), but I didn’t know anything about dogs. Besides, the dog-training book said it was important to establish dominion over your puppy or he would always be the master, and thinking of the lamentable Rosie, and also perhaps of my inability to establish any dominion over myself, I was determined to do just that.
I crouched down next to the oblivious ball of fluff. Drop it, I said, in the low tone of command I was instructed to use in puppy-training class. Henry didn’t look up. I said it again and again, and of course he ignored me. Finally, determined to exercise at least this much authority, I grabbed the bone to take it away. Henry snarled as savagely as something that looked like a stuffed baby polar bear could snarl, and bit me.
For a moment I just stared at the puppy, who looked back at me, his head slightly cocked, endearingly, infuriatingly indifferent. I had been trying so hard to make him love me. Then I sat down in the dirt and cried. That got Henry’s attention, and he stood up. But if I was expecting a Disney-esque moment where he loped over to console me—and of course I was—I was mistaken. Henry edged away, with a little frightened whimper, turned his back on me, and fell asleep.
As I sat in the dirt, half laughing at the utter misery of the moment, a memory bloomed, of rolling around on the floor of the loft with Zoë after a checkup at the pediatrician’s. I hadn’t slept in days, Lee was in China, and I could not figure out how to get her out of the Snugli that bound the baby to my chest. She was crying and I was crying and I was pretty sure that in the history of the world in all its folly there had never been so spectacular a failure of a mother. Zoë’s arrival had changed everything, and I had wondered if I would ever be the same. I never was of course, a fact for which I am still stupendously grateful.
Now, Zoë, by her leaving, had once again turned my life upside down. But if her presence had become, after our somewhat shaky start-up, the wind in my sails, her departure had blown away my moorings as easily as a child blows away the seeds on a dandelion, scattering everything I thought I knew, leaving an emptiness unlike any I had known. Why was I so undone?
Because she was the only thing I ever did right.
The idea came unbidden. I ran my hand through the dirt, feeling its grit on my palm, breathing in the dank air that smelled of the decayed fallen weeds, looking up at the opaque, tree-shrouded hills that seemed every day to grow closer and closer, making it harder to see the sky. Was it true?
Raising Zoë had been the only thing I had done without design. As with Henry, I had read a million books about how to be a mother, but Zoë had thrown them all out the window simply by virtue of being herself. No book could tell me who she was, no parenting guide could tell me what she needed. Only she could do that.
Being a mother was the only thing I had done instinctively, improvising, making mistakes, figuring out what worked and what didn’t. I had never set out to be a great mother or a good mother—I hadn’t even known I wanted children until I fell in love with my husband’s. I expected nothing from myself—I just didn’t want to mess her up. The British pediatrician Donald Winnicott had a phrase for that: he called it being a good enough mother. And I think I had been that.
What had saved me—what had saved Zoë—was that motherhood was a world I had entered without expectations—my own or any others. If I had tried to be a great parent I would have failed, or if I hadn’t failed I would have figured out a way to belittle my performance, to blame myself for botching the job. But unlike work, or school, or any other arena of life that mattered to me, parenting wasn’t an arena where goals had been set—by myself or my parents or anyone else—and not met, where the need to be good had inevitably made me run headlong the other way. Zoë was chaos, the wilderness, where I had had to make my own way.
That was the way the past looked to me then, staring past the snuffling puppy in the fading sunlight, to the maze of memory that was my map to the way things were. For a long time it was the only map I had, but it was not in fact the only one that existed.
The next morning Calvin and Mike and the others had arrived to fix my roof, the mudroom, and the woodshed, and, as it turned out, to restore a little sanity into the bargain.
For one thing, they loved Henry. They didn’t mind him getting in their way when they worked, they brought their wives and girlfriends to meet him, roughhoused with him when they had the time, and ignored him when they were busy. They laughed when he rolled in mud puddles and cuffed him when he misbehaved. He was just a dog to them, not a litmus test, not a sociopathic shark puppy, just a dog doing doggy things. Calvin, in particular, took an interest in him. He had grown up on a farm and helped his father raise forty hunting dogs. He’s a fine pup, Calvin said. He’s going to be a good dog.
I worry that he doesn’t like me, I confessed.
Calvin gave me the look, the slightly pitying but polite you’re-talking-to-a-foreigner look I was getting used to in Vermont. He has to, Calvin said. Beat him till he’s blind, he’ll still think you’re the sun and the moon. Can’t help himself.
One afternoon, I came outside to find them staring up the driveway at a corner of the yard where the wild weeds met the more feral brambles that marked the onset of the creepy woods.
They were watching Henry, they told me. Every afternoon he ambled up the circular path of flattened grass that was the putative driveway, headed for the brambles, stayed for a while, and then half trotted, half tumbled back down again. Something up there sure got his attention, they said.
I walked up after him. The puppy would stick his head in the bushes and jerk it out again, nibbling something. I looked closer. Blackberries. The brambles were actually blackberry canes, and that corner of the yard was thick with them. But getting at the fruit was hard work for the puppy: most of the berries were too high up for him to access and the ones closer to the ground were deep within a wall of very sharp thorns.
I reached in, snagged a few of the fruit, an
d tried them. They were fat, sweet, and juicy, blackberries as I had never known them. I grabbed a few more and knelt down and offered them to Henry. He snaffled them up and we looked at each other, in mutual greed, and I went to work, dividing the impromptu harvest equally until we had both had our fill.
After that, our trip to the blackberry bushes became a ritual, first thing in the morning, last thing in the afternoon. The puppy began to follow me, and together we explored more of the land immediately surrounding the house than I had ever done on my own. On such frail anchors do we begin to hang a routine, a rhythm, a connection, perhaps even a life.
One day I came back from some errands to find Calvin, Mike, Hank, and Jimmy packing up their gear for the last time. The work was done: the ceiling in the mudroom was freshly painted and perfect, the wood was back in the newly constructed woodshed. The redesigned garage now boasted a space big enough for a car and a roof that would withstand the snow. There was nothing left to do (actually there was a lot left to do, but there was no money left with which to do it).
I was sorry to see them go. Sorry, and a little afraid of facing the empty house and its silent rebuke. As he was gathering the last of the paintbrushes and plaster knives, I thanked Calvin, the de facto leader of the group, for the work they had done and for helping me to understand Henry. He’s a good dog, he said again. I think he’s ready for more. Take him out, maybe in the woods. I had the feeling that perhaps it wasn’t just Henry who Calvin thought might be ready for more.