by Sara Dillon
We walked out into the snow in the dark mornings; he slept in a box under my desk as I wrote. Roger, Roger, Roger, I would sing to him; he was high-spirited, happy. My parents got wind of the fact that I had him and tried to quiz me on it. They didn’t like me breaking the rules, but it was more than that. With Gramma, of course, she more or less opposed anything that involved change, truly anything—driving a car, taking a dance class, making a phone call. Her face would take on a particular look and she would quietly begin to oppose the plan.
Why on earth would you want a dog? she said. And then if the matter was important enough, there would be headaches and tears.
But Roger stayed, chewing my shoes and notebooks. I came back to my room some days and found shredded paper, cloth, towels, all over the floor. And despite the fact that I hated a mess, I forgave him. I don’t remember even being vexed at him. I could not be angry at Roger.
I conned someone into minding him over the Christmas holidays; someone who couldn’t leave the science lab, a boy with a crush on me, anxious to please. I would visit Roger when I could, joyous reunions in the snow fields, indulging his wish to run, rubbing his jaw along the ice as if laughing, something like a dolphin.
The only terrible thing that Roger did was to chew the edge of the piano Daddy had had delivered for me from home; the one that had belonged to my sister Marie who had died at thirteen. I managed to have the marks repaired by the same boy, the one with the crush on me, but I always looked at the spot nervously, out of the corner of my eye, trying to judge whether someone with no prior knowledge of the incident would notice it or not.
Winters were huge then, not like the tepid seasons we have now. Low hanging snow clouds, skating contests, Canadian television, the whole business. Daddy would lie on the floor of our living room watching hockey games, northern lights outside just beyond the horizon. Saint Theo’s was a mere half hour or so from our house, so I could go home nearly every weekend.
There was an order in which I listened to music every morning before leaving the house or dorm, as if fortifying myself against reality—Concerto de Aranjuez, Swan Lake, Zeferelli’s Romeo and Juliet.
Roger and I wandered out into those big winters, below the northern lights, rolling in the snow that never melted. Roger lived all that first winter of his, and he lived so well. Vermonters had a sense of different kinds of snow and slight changes of season, or they used to; the names of the months and the quality of the snow fit together like transparent puzzle pieces, and gave us something to do on the long, boring trek back to spring. That is probably not so any more; there isn’t that kind of daily snow; winter has retreated.
To be fair, I never wrote poems about Roger while he lived, in praise of Roger, as it were. But I photographed Roger smiling, and Roger with his friends, as if he were a real child; Roger frolicking. And it was that wish to see him thoroughly enjoy himself that made me let him off the leash to run on the snow and ice of the end of winter; a March cover that must have a particular name. The idea was to catch him again at the end of the field, and put him back on his leash. Roger outsmarted me, though, and ran straight into the road. He never saw the van, and the van never slowed down. Roger lay dying in the March snow. Roger’s spirit floated out and away into the grey white air, and I began to mourn in a way that lasted for days and weeks.
Classmates who saw me in the days after that thought that Daddy had passed on. Instead, they learned that it was Roger who had met an untimely end. There were a few more snowstorms right after that, I remember. I made my way through the drifts, hiding my face in a scarf, beside myself. And one day, I met Calvin Pini, jacket open carelessly to the elements, stalking through the snow near my dorm.
Jeez, Catherine, what happened? he asked me.
It’s Roger, I said, Roger is dead.
Calvin stopped. He considered. He struck the air with his fist.
Damn, he said, damn.
That night, they called me to the telephone. Calvin was on the other end, and told me to listen, just listen. He began to read a poem about Roger in dog heaven, walking briskly along a river bank, meeting his pals. Do you hear me, Catherine? Are you listening?
Poor John Merrill; he had to hear all the poems about dogs and death in the snow. He sat back, puffed on his pipe, sighed. Another professor in the department complained that depth of feeling about dogs was becoming an acid test of human likeability. Yet, they were good poems. In particular, For Roger was about living through one long winter, only to die at the first moment of spring. Calvin and I lay side by side on my bed, stomach down, looking at the photo of Roger laughing, a huge smile, his feet dancing.
Good old Roger, said Calvin.
Yet, for all that, Calvin didn’t save me when he could have. It’s clear, I think, why I might have expected him to.
We began to go everywhere together, in Calvin’s ancient Peugeot. We listened to Astral Weeks, and spring came on in earnest, with such warm days. Roger wasn’t able to know anything of this, of course; there was an odd, brooding quality to the new heat, the song of the grass uncovered. As for Vivaldi, it was his summer that was the saddest, not winter. This was the sort of thing I could tell Calvin. Just as there are things you can never forgive, the opposite is also true, that there are things of a gracious, indelible and beloved nature. Calvin telling me about dog heaven was just such a one as that.
And we even escaped, Calvin and I. It was rare for me to willingly bring anyone along on an escape. It might cut down on experiences, you know, or limit the process of storehousing impressions. But escape together we did, to Scotland. And, to a lesser extent, the West of Ireland, a place I knew a little about.
I had applied on my own to spend a semester in Glasgow; Glasgow of all places, in the 1970s. So Calvin applied for a place in Aberdeen. It was brave of him, I guess, and loyal. Once I had my place in Glasgow set up, a one-room flat in an old house, cut up into pieces for rental, Calvin and I left to visit Ireland. I have the sense of having dragged him there. It had been a long time since I’d seen Clement and Nuala; I didn’t plan to visit them, but wanted to bring Calvin to the West.
We sat side by side on a boat heading for Inis Mór. There were not so many tourists in those days; it was still a hidden place; it was as I remembered it. The boat rocked back and forth, back and forth, in a stomach-churning way. A pair of twin brothers, with pointed noses and in contrasting stocking caps, went back and forth to the bar. The boat rocked up and down; the horizon was first above me, then below me. Someone, one of the brothers I think, vomited up whiskey. Calvin and I turned away; I put my head on his lap. The horizon spun up and then down, the sea eating the sky and back again.
On Inis Mór we walked to our B & B; there were German cyclists staying there. The landlady said her husband disliked speaking English; the girls working there joked in Irish using lots of dirty expressions they then translated for us. Calvin and I walked and walked in the huge puffs of air and grassy sunshine. We lay down at Dun Aengus with the rocks against our backs. How deep is that ocean, how high is that sky, Calvin sang, cabaret style, snapping his fingers and pretending to hold a microphone. During meals at the B & B, a lady teacher from England talked about the sensible waterproof jumpers of the children; Calvin and I put our heads down, trying not to laugh. I did sketches of Calvin, lying down, even sleeping. Calvin called my small feet in their blue shoes little hooves.
But after all, to describe small joys such as these is tiresome. As Tolstoy had it, recounting happiness is as difficult as it is predictable, and therefore perhaps does not require recounting. And even so, I wonder was it happiness. Even then, it is likely that I was planning my escape from Calvin, or if not from Calvin as such, my escape from this closeness, the leisurely mornings, the shared prospect of ancient navy blue and white waves, and angular rocks, and bright flowers in incongruous gardens.
We played gin rummy on trains going slowly across Britain. When Calvin had a winning hand, he would fan the cards out from his fingers and say
, Read ‘em and weep. He gave me books of poetry and wrote on the title pages things like, For you, who could raise small birds to a whisper.
He would arrive from Aberdeen on Friday evenings, getting off the bus that stopped right outside my window. The bus would pause, move on, and there was Calvin in his long leather coat, bought at a flea market in London. He would look up to the window, open his mouth and pretend to be a dog laughing. We would hide from my landlady, smoking in front of the electric fire. How damp it was, even colder and wetter than Galway. We would put on heavy sweaters and walk slowly around the university art gallery, talking about Augustus John. Calvin brought me small, beautiful presents.
We thought of spending the whole year, but decided to go back to Saint Theo’s at Christmas.
Then there were wintertime parties at John Merrill’s federalist house. His wife was an expert knitter and all the children wore elaborate knit sweaters. There was wool and yarn everywhere in their house. Merrill would stand in the passageway between the kitchen and living room, sighing, and rendering comments on poems that we brought him to look at.
You might just say it, well, from here on, he would say, his large hands running over the paper, bringing the lines to life. He was tolerant even of obvious mistakes and disharmonies. As midnight approached, he would put Mahler on the record player.
But yes, as with all such moments, they are tedious to recount, tedious to read about, only lovely in memory, that untranslatable place. Even Proust with his madeleine, well, I mean, an identification with that wonderful taste can take you just so far. And then, inevitably, you want to hear about unhappiness.
As far as that is concerned, well, I liked to kiss. Not more than kissing for the most part, just a lot of kisses. It has been said that my story lacks eros, and maybe it does; but I was a kiss expert. Which brings to mind Peggy Lipton, boasting that she was alone among women, as far as she knew, in having slept with both Paul McCartney and Elvis; an odd thing to want on your résumé, I would have thought. Rather, in my own more specialized sphere, I was intent on kissing men from many walks of life. And thus, the story of Calvin and Catherine becomes inevitably less of an idyll, and before too long.
How we came to have Louis (pronounced as Louie), the Brittany Spaniel, I cannot now recall. He was a wonder dog, he could sail over tall fences, swim for ages, look you in the eyes and tell your mood. This time, it was Calvin’s attic room that hid the dog, but Louis demanded a good deal of racing around outside, the new focus of our drives to the country. Calvin would maneuver close to the small trees and bushes at the side of the road, and Louis would put his face out the window, letting the branches brush against his face.
We considered having him neutered, both to calm him down and because Louis had no need for a son and heir, but Calvin returned to campus after a short time, saying that he hadn’t the heart to turn Louis into what he called “a creep.” When Calvin went home to Connecticut in the summer to be with his Italian grandmother, he sent me photos of Louis smiling and enclosed new poems, mostly about birds. For some, it was angels; for Calvin, it was birds.
Merrill invited poets to come to Saint Theo’s; he would herd us out onto the grass and let us read our work for them. The wind in the trees, the end of such long winters, my blouse with the high waist and my long wild hair, I do remember it, but to reach the scene in my heart takes more work than before. On the grass, holding my papers, doodling in the margins, and Merrill whispering to me, What’s the drawing of?
This is Catherine, my super poet, he would announce. In retrospect, how I took it for granted, not in the way that sounds, but how I assumed some version of this would last a length of time that might as well be forever. Now don’t go all diffident on me, Catherine, he would say.
Like other things, this time came to its end, though in a way that cannot be described with irony or in soft focus. This one came to an end like death, like the real end of all things. Probably because of kissing, my audacious wish to kiss.
Who can I blame for what happened next? It was Calvin, for not rescuing me. It was the notion, acquired over time, that there was no real danger in anyone and that nothing truly terrible could ever happen. It isn’t clear to me if I have ever escaped from what came next.
On what is happy; 2006
I thought and thought about what to teach in the comparative literature seminar at Stannard. I had to be careful that I wasn’t teaching Comparative Me. On the other hand, did it matter? Would they know the difference, catch the veiled references? The first thing that came to mind was René Girard. I don’t know why his ideas stood out so clearly, when other theories, trendier, had fallen by the wayside. I remembered his vision of the novel, moving from descriptions of genuine desire through mediated desire. Mediated desire was something I had often thought about. It was part of my early plan that I would wage war against mediated desire—a phrase which meant, wanting something because others wanted it—and return the world, or at least myself, to a state of purity of wanting, just because, inexplicably and unalterably. The greater the mediation of desire, the stupider the person, that had always been my rule of thumb.
I thought again of teaching Dazai, The Setting Sun—Shayō in Japanese—the roadmap for destruction of the self. You had to be Japanese to enjoy that process fully and not see it as tragic; rather, to see it as inevitable.
And so I considered, at night, after Emmet and Medina were asleep, their healthy breathing regular and relaxed. The winter wind in the trees was comforting, the regularity of the way Greensboro’s roads came together and went apart again was comforting.
Hello, she said, half a word, half a moan, sounding small and faraway and lost. I had to phone Gramma, I couldn’t let that go.
What’s wrong? It was the way I almost always started conversations with her.
What do you think is wrong? This was also familiar territory. She was referring, of course, to me.
Did Una tell you I was asked to teach at Stannard State? You remember Stannard? We used to go there with Daddy, remember? I felt my exhilaration waning; there was nothing to this teaching of a course.
How can you be happy when that is all so much less than what you had before? You were never happy with anything. Never.
She went on as if she had been waiting by the phone for this.
You married Yukito, you weren’t happy. You went to Ireland to teach, you weren’t happy. You didn’t like law, didn’t like anything.
She paused. Don’t you think everyone can see it? They can; they all see it.
Who sees it? Who are you talking about?
It was far better not to argue at these times; I knew it well. Una said, Be perky, be chipper, talk to her about table cloths or something. Gramma moaned slightly at my remark.
What’s the matter?
I am in such pain. Her bones were disintegrating, that was true. She was getting smaller and smaller; from a tall slender woman, she had become smaller than me, bent over.
What are you going to do with those children? she began again.
They are fine; they love it here. They always wanted to live in Vermont.
What a shame you ever got them, if you were going to do this. Didn’t you know?
There was another long pause. You did up that apartment so beautifully; oh, it was going to be great. Now Una’s had to take it all apart.
Well, I’m sorry about that, I said lamely.
I had so prayed that you would be happy this time. You didn’t want to be in Ireland, wanted to come back, and then you didn’t want that, didn’t want law. Time after time, I have so prayed that you would be happy.
I wasn’t sure if she’d hung up, or dropped the phone, or simply couldn’t continue. Yes, looked at that way, it was madness. Una had been closing up our apartment in Cambridge; she reported from time to time that she was throwing things out, bags of old cards and letters. She loved bringing things to Goodwill, and always told how many bags she had managed to fit in her trunk. If the Goodwill store wa
sn’t open, she would just pile the bags on the sidewalk and drive away. I let them deal with it, she would say, I just make the donations.
This was how I kept on losing things; when I left my husband Yukito, he cleaned out my things as well, and told me he couldn’t pack it all up and send it on to me, it had to go. Years later, I continued to look for books and photographs that were nowhere to be found. I assumed they’d disappeared in a purge of this kind, now here was another. Una was especially hard on all the pink handbags and hair ribbons I’d bought for Madina when she was small. I could never throw those things away; they hummed quietly whenever I looked at them; it had been so easy to make her happy when she was small.
You open the boxes, everything is pink, Una said. And all those postcards, what do you want them for?
Una never tired of pointing out that, by contrast, I didn’t own much of anything. It was true, I always wore the same thing, I never shopped for myself. Why do you like black so much? Madina would ask. It’s just that it likes me, I would answer.
It took a while to recover from these conversations with Gramma.
It took until the empty hours of late evening or very early morning, when I could recover that sense of repetition, of thwarted anticipation, like sitting in a sauna of my own ideas, fully clothed.
There were things about Gramma that were actually wonderful. She would sometimes echo her own father and say, Not funny, McGee. She expressed herself with a surprising brand of violence whenever she caught sight of conservative politicians on television. Old flannel mouth, she would mutter.
This was a crisis, after all, and no one is at their best at such times.
But for Gramma there were no rules in the universe at all; nothing to speculate on or plan for. Rather, things just happened, out of the blue, all surprises. For that reason, while not irrational, she never said anything that could be said to be rational. People were either dear and darling, or inexplicably cruel and indifferent. Everything she knew came from East Galway, without the cunning that not infrequently crops up even there. We could never plan a path for ourselves, but only hope to run into something good, where, as Una I think said, we could fool people into being nice to us.