Let's Take the Long Way Home

by Gail Caldwell

  The personal empathy came from my comparatively cloistered past: I had stopped drinking twelve years earlier, in 1984. But whereas Caroline had gone mainstream with her addiction, I was old school and deeply private about my own struggles with alcohol. I believed the “anonymous” part of AA was there as a protective shield, and I had worn it as such for years.

  We traded a tentative hello at the pond that day while the dogs introduced themselves more boisterously. “Caroline, do you remember me?” I said, and she smiled and said yes. I said, “God, you’ve been going through it lately—are you all right?” She looked surprised, then relieved. She told me later that she had been walking around that day exhausted, half undone by the exposure she was getting, and that talking to me had been a balm—I was more interested in her dog than her book sales. So was she: We were like new moms in the park, trading vital bits of information about our charges that was enthralling only to us. I mentioned a two-thousand-acre wooded reserve north of the city called Middlesex Fells, where I was training my headstrong sled dog to run off-lead, and Caroline asked how to get there. Because the route was complicated, I explained it self-consciously, afraid that she was being polite and I was being long-winded. The place was half an hour away, tough to find even without traffic, and only someone devoted to training, as I was, would ever bother to find it.

  A week later, at the Fells, I heard someone calling my name across Sheepfold Meadow, and I saw Caroline on the edge of the grounds, waving and smiling. I was surprised and pleased—she must have actually remembered my byzantine directions, then followed through. Paying attention, I would come to find out, was one of the things Caroline did. She called me a few days later to propose a walk together; when she couldn’t reach me, she called again. An introvert with a Texan’s affability, I was well intentioned but weak on follow-through; not without reason did an old friend refer to me as the gregarious hermit. I wanted the warmth of spontaneous connection and the freedom to be left alone. Caroline knocked politely on the front door of my inner space, waited, then knocked again. She was persistent, she seemed smart and warmhearted, and—to my delight—she was writing a book, she told me when we spoke, about people’s emotional connections to dogs. She seemed like someone for whom I wouldn’t mind breaking my monkish ways.

  That book became Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs, published a couple of years later; Caroline gave me the name of Grace, and recast Clementine as an Alaskan malamute named Oakley. Within weeks after our encounter at Sheepfold Meadow, we were planning outings every few days; the Fells became one of our regular destinations. We ran the dogs for hours in those woods outside of town, and in other woods, searching out gorgeous reserves of forests and fields all over eastern Massachusetts. We walked the beaches that autumn, and the fire trails in winter, carrying liver snaps for the dogs and graham crackers for the humans. We walked until all four of us were dumb with fatigue. The dogs would go charging through the switchbacks while Caroline and I walked and talked—over time so much and so deeply that we began referring to our afternoon-long treks as analytic walks.

  “Let’s take the long way home,” she would say when we’d gotten to the car, and then we would wend our way through the day traffic of Somerville or Medford, in no hurry to separate. At the end of the drive, with Clementine snoring softly in the back seat, we would sit outside the house of whoever was being dropped off, and keep talking. Then we would go inside our respective houses and call each other on the phone.

  “What about the ponds freezing?” I said one evening after a walk in early winter, when the dogs were still blasting out into the water, oblivious to anything but their own joy. “I’m worried about the ice being thin, and the dogs going out to chase birds, and falling through—you know this happens to someone every winter. Some dog runs out onto the ice, and the owner goes after her, and the dog manages to get out and the human drowns. And you know we would both go after the dogs.”

  Caroline listened to me rant—I came to realize that her listening could be so intent, it almost had a sound—and sighed before she answered. “We’re going to have to start walking with a rope and an ax, aren’t we?” she said. She always knew how to talk me down from the tree.

  I suppose every friendship has such indicators—the checks and balances of the relationship that make it stronger or more generous than either of you alone. For both of us, in different ways, the volume of the world had been turned up a notch. Whether this sensitivity functioned as a failing or an asset, I think we recognized it in each other from the start. Even on that first afternoon we spent together—a four-hour walk through late-summer woods—I remember being moved by Caroline: It was a different response from simple affection or camaraderie. She was so quiet, so careful, and yet so fully present, and I found it a weightless liberation to be with someone whose intensity seemed to match and sometimes surpass my own. Her hesitation was what tethered her sincerity: As much as Caroline revealed in her books, she was a deeply private person who moved into relationships with great deliberation. I had known enough writers in my life, including myself, to recognize this trait: What made it to the page was never the whole story, but rather the writer’s version of the story—a narrative with its creator in full control.

  I also thought that first day, more than once, that Caroline wished she were someplace else, because she kept checking her watch—she must have looked at it, she believed covertly, a half dozen times. I would learn to live with this little ritual, which had nothing to do with me. It was a marker for Caroline’s anxiety, a way to anchor her place in the world no matter how open-ended her schedule. But that day I found it unnerving, and I finally asked her if she had to be somewhere. She was mortified, I think, and apologized, and we walked until dusk pushed us out of the woods. Monitoring the increments of time, particularly since she had stopped drinking, was Caroline’s stopgap against the free fall of the days.

  And one other repeated gesture would touch me that day in a way I couldn’t have articulated at the time. Determined to keep up with Clementine, I had become a devoted dog walker; I also had had polio as a child and so walked with a slight limp and imbalance in the world. However much I compensated by toughing my way through, I was frailer on land than I liked to admit. When we went out in late September, the forest floor was covered with newly fallen acorns, and I kept slipping on them and fell more than once. I was used to my lifelong ungainliness and said so, making light of it; what I didn’t say was that I was accustomed to awkward responses. When I explained the limp by saying I’d had polio, people tended to be either overly concerned or uncomfortable. Caroline, who never seemed to doubt my capabilities for a moment, was neither. After that first stumble, whenever I slipped she would put out an arm to brace me; holding on to her became as natural as reaching for a branch. If I was an ambler by nature and ability, Caroline was a sprinter—she was fast, she was agile, and she was often in a hurry, whether she meant to be or not. But once she ascertained my usual gait, she slowed her pace to mine and kept it there.

  EXCEPT FOR THE FACT that we had both had sisters, our childhoods had little in common. Caroline had been born a twin, appearing a few minutes after her sister, Becca, and the two had stayed close throughout their lives. Because I’d had a good friend in Texas who was a twin, I recognized in Caroline the parallel traits that seemed born of this primal dyad—she had a capacity for intimacy that could sometimes seem private and absolute. My sister was two years older than I, and I’d grown up accustomed to being both bossed around and looked after. I was the daughter of fourth-generation Texans from struggling farming families; my parents had settled in the desolate Texas Panhandle, and my dad had been a master sergeant in the Second World War. Caroline had led what she called a sheltered existence within the milieu of intellectual Cambridge. Her father, who had died a few years before I met her, was an esteemed psychiatrist and psychoanalyst; Caroline had identified with him and adored him. She told me early in our friendship, with no small degree o
f amusement, that when she was a little girl of six or seven, he had sat on the end of her bed with a legal pad, pen at the ready, and asked her about her dreams. Her mother was an artist and an introvert, and she had died a year after Caroline’s father. So she had lost both parents to cancer when she was in her early thirties, a double injury that had been cataclysmic for her; she stayed drunk for another year, then drove herself to rehab in 1994.

  I knew much of this from her book and some of it from what she told me that first long afternoon in the woods; I also learned that day that she had just separated from her boyfriend of six years—a large-hearted man who went by his last name, Morelli. The break turned out to be temporary, and after Morelli and I became friends, Caroline and I often called him “the last good boyfriend in America.” All of this piecemeal story—the narrative unfolding in the early friendship—belonged to a sinewy, solemn woman who seemed to me like the kind of person you’d pick to drive the tractor home in a hailstorm. She was tough, she was unassuming, and I suspect her stalwart reliability, which revealed itself to me in more than one crisis, came in part from practice: Having survived both anorexia and alcoholism, she had already walked through her version of worst fears.

  I HAD JUST navigated my own crossroads. I was in my early forties, at an age when the view from the hill can be clear and poignant both. The imagined vistas have become realized paths, and I think you may live in the present during those years more than any time since childhood. I’d spent my thirties in a big-city newsroom where adrenaline and testosterone were as pervasive as deadlines, and I’d recently given up a stint as book review editor to go back to my ordinary job as book critic for The Boston Globe. This transition, as well as the recent shifts in technology, allowed me to work from home and hang around with the dog, who quickly learned that reading was my equivalent of chewing on a bone. I had long thought that the gods had handed me work tailor-made for my idiosyncrasies: I was too opinionated to be a straight news reporter, too gadabout to be an academic. I was dreamy, stubborn, and selectively fanatical; my idea of a productive day, as both a child and an adult, was reading for hours and staring out the window. It was my good fortune that I had found an occupation requiring just these talents; now, with Clementine, I could spend whole days in near silence, reading or writing or speaking in the simpler, heart-sure vernacular of human-to-dog.

  The first several months that Caroline and I knew each other come back to me with the scent of winter: the crisp, distinctively East Coast aura of snow and city streets and radiator heat. I gave her fur-lined mittens in November on her birthday; a few weeks later, we both begged off other Thanksgiving plans, then cooked a roast chicken together after a day in the woods with the dogs. The weather got worse and colder and we adjusted our schedules accordingly: She taught me how to walk across frozen trails and sideways down steep hills, digging my feet into the terrain. I taught her the freestyle in an indoor pool, coaxing her to lay her face in the water to learn to regulate her breathing, while she stood there cursing me and shivering.

  It seems to me now that Caroline was always cold. After the anorexia of her twenties, she had stayed on the thin side of normal, and she would show up for our walks swaddled in layers of fleece. As often as possible we headed for the woods or the reservoir, but sometimes in the evening, when the New England sun had disappeared at an early hour, we would sneak into the Harvard athletic fields, near where I lived at the time, so that the dogs could have an open space to run. The fields backed onto a public housing project, separated by a high, dilapidated chain-link fence. Getting onto the hallowed grounds was a two-person job: One of us lifted the fence where it had come loose over a ditch while the other rolled under it with the dogs, then held it up from the other side. Our trespass was illegal as well as rough—it was the kind of thing I had done all the time as a girl in Texas—and I was glad that Caroline was willing; for all of her exploits in the drinking world, she still possessed a good-girl quality that I had never been able to muster. We’d stand there in the frigid dark, the dogs illuminated against the night sky by Clementine’s whiteness and the lights from the ball fields. It was like being encased in a cave of quiet and cold, and we stayed until we couldn’t bear it any longer, telling each other stories—Caroline in her new Ugg boots, shivering and smoking, with me getting an illicit, still pleasant whiff of the smoke (I had quit four years earlier). Sometimes we’d sink onto the ground and lean against the old tattered fence, letting the dogs rummage in our pockets for biscuits before they went tearing out into the dark again. We used to laugh that people with common sense or without dogs were somewhere in a warm restaurant, or traveling, or otherwise living the sort of life that all of us think, from time to time, that we ought to be living or at least desiring. But there was nowhere else I wanted to be, beyond sitting there on the hard earth under a night sky, watching the dogs and talking.

  THOSE FIELDS WERE also where we had our first misunderstanding, or confrontation, or whatever you call the seemingly trivial empathic failures that serve as a testing ground and gateway for intimacy. By the end of that winter, it was clear that we cared for each other and the routines we had so quickly established; less acknowledged was the crucial place we were carving out in each other’s lives. For a few days I had been bearing a bruise in silence that had to do with our regard for each other as writers: something so core to me that it still gives me pause to remember my discomfort. As a reviewer for a big daily newspaper, I was the older and more seasoned writer; Caroline was the young turk at the alternative paper who’d enjoyed a rush of attention for her memoir. Because we had known of each other for a few years before we’d met, we had relied on that implicit assumption between writers of recognizing the other’s achievement; in most relationships, this commonality of purpose would more than suffice. But Caroline had never said anything directly about what I did or what she thought about how well I did it, though she had given me a copy of her memoir and asked repeatedly if I had liked it.

  Now I see this in a different light: I believe she saw me as the one with more of the power and less of the ego needs or demands. That day in the field, I had no such insight. A long piece I’d written for the Globe had just been published, and I was exhausted. We were walking along and Caroline had muttered some acknowledgment about how hard I’d been working, though nothing about the essay itself. Finally I blurted out, “I have to ask you something difficult—I need to know what you think about my work.”

  She looked at me aghast. “Oh my God,” she said. “I’ve turned into my mother. I assumed you knew how I felt, but I never told you.” She rushed to reassure me, and we talked for the rest of the walk about what a swampland this was: the world of envy and rivalry and self-doubt (between women, and writers, and women writers), about insecurity and power differentials. We found out that day, fairly quickly, how great and complex our fondness was for each other; I also had my first sense of something central about Caroline that would become a pillar of our friendship. When she was confronted with any emotional difficulty, however slight or major, her response was to approach rather than to flee. There she would stay until the matter was resolved, and the emotional aftermath was free of any hangover or recrimination. My instincts toward resolution were similar: I knew that silence and distance were far more pernicious than head-on engagement. This compatibility helped ensure that there was no unclaimed baggage between us in the years to come.

  As relieved as I was that day by the conversation, I was unnerved by my own vulnerability. It was as though Caroline and I had crossed into a territory where everything mattered and that we were in it together. “Oh no,” I said, half laughing but with tears in my eyes. “What is it?” she asked, concerned, and I said, “I need you.”

  3.

  SHE WOULD SAY, I THINK, THAT THE NEED WAS GREATER on her end. She was at the beginning of what would become a two-year separation from Morelli, with whom she’d been involved for years and whom she would later marry; she had recently lost both parents; a
nd she saw me, probably through an idealizing lens, as a competent woman who had built a life alone. The more complicated truth was that I was also at a pivotal point: I’d given up a lot of what didn’t work, and drinking was only the beginning of the list. “You chose solitude,” another friend had told me. “Well, I think solitude chose me,” I said. “The old bride-of-Christ thing.” Still, I’d always been comfortable in my own company, sometimes to the displeasure of friends or romantic partners. My last love interest of any importance had ended, badly, a few years earlier. One of my closest friends from the past decade, an artist and filmmaker, had just left Cambridge for New York. I had a number of old and solid friendships, male and female both, but these days most of the local ones belonged in the second circle of intimacy—the people you’d call when you were hit by a bus, but not necessarily if you’d merely sprained an ankle.

  “Men don’t really understand women’s friendships, do they?” I once asked my friend Louise, a writer who lived in Minnesota. “Oh God, no,” she said. “And we must never tell them.” The fact was that I had been weaned on intense and valiant friendships among women, thanks to the milieu in which I’d come of age in Texas. I was in my early twenties during the heyday of the antiwar movement and the rise of feminism in the 1970s, which in Austin were closely linked. The women I knew there had burned the old rule book: the one in which women shopped instead of talked, competed for the silverback through any means, protected their fears and longings from one another as if they were professional trade secrets. I’d been part of an all-girl rock-’n’-roll band that got arrested together; we had relied on one another through whatever trials the decade presented, from medical school to drug addiction. When I left Austin for New England in 1981, intent on becoming a writer, what courage I possessed came in part from those passionate connections.