Let's Take the Long Way Home

by Gail Caldwell

  My agenda disappeared in that moment, and Clementine’s burgeoning temperament was given the room it required. I let her go and hoisted her onto my shoulder, and she fell on me like a kid being carted home from the fair. From that moment on, everything changed between us. Wherever I danced, she followed.

  I told Caroline this story one afternoon at the Fells when we were circling the fire trails in autumn. We were talking that day about the realized life versus the external picture of it: the assumptions and projections that we all make about other people’s lives. Each of us had endured complaints from our non-dog friends about our disappearance into the woods, but what our critics couldn’t see were the glorious recesses of this new place: the colors and smells and hints of sublimity that these walks ensured. Caroline, so often a captive to her own reserve, was now rolling around on the forest floor, laughing and wrestling with the dogs without a shred of inhibition. I was training Clementine off-lead, using hand signals to get her into a down-stay from ten yards away, and she would start to whimper after a few seconds, then break the stay and come charging toward me. Pack of four, we were, planting flags all over the province of our rearranged lives. So much of what we valued was being played out in those woods, in what we were building with the dogs and with each other. And so I looked at Caroline at the end of that fine day and said, “You know—after all this, I don’t think that any man could ever treat me badly again.”

  TO PEOPLE WHO have spent their lives thick with the bounty of other people, attachment itself is complex but assumed. For the introvert, it is a more nebulous territory. I was able to be effusive and warm in my human interactions because I knew when and how they would end: end of day, end of party, end of walk, end of relationship. In the drinking years, the bourbon was the soul mate waiting on the trail, the fixed love object that made me eschew or shrug off others. But walls, whether built by brick or isolation, don’t come down without a corresponding amount of labor. Without even knowing it, I think Caroline and I coaxed each other into the light. We did this slowly, and with such pronounced attention to the other’s autonomy that neither of us had to move an inch to get away from the other.

  I think back now to the small measures of trust gained in that first year of the friendship, the ways we went from mutual caution to inseparable ease, and so much of it now seems like a careful, even silent exchange. I knew about Caroline’s history with anorexia, and on our long excursions in the woods, I would take two graham crackers out of my pocket and hand her one matter-of-factly, without even looking at her. I must have realized, half consciously, that she was too polite to refuse; we were both on the thin side, and so my offering, to the anorectic mind, was relatively unthreatening. Then I started adding small chunks of chocolate to the stash. The primal and mutual pleasure of this act touches me now, though I couldn’t have articulated it, or maybe even recognized it, at the time. After years of struggling with a harsh inner voice of denial and control, Caroline was letting me feed her—reluctantly at first, then with some relief. And I, so long afraid of having anyone need me too much, was foraging around for nuts and berries, bringing them back to the creature I loved.

  Counting on each other became automatic. When I found a sweater in Texas I wanted, I learned to buy two, which was easier than seeing the look of disappointment on Caroline’s face when I returned home with only one. When she went out from the boathouse on a windy day, she gave me her schedule in advance, which assuaged her worst-case scenario of flipping the boat, being hit on the head by an oar, and leaving Lucille stranded at home. I still have my set of keys to her house, to locks and doors that no longer exist, and I keep them in my glove compartment, where they have been moved from one car to another in the past couple of years. Someday I will throw them in the Charles, where I lost the seat to her boat and so much else.

  “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” I would say in the early afternoon, when I called after the writing hours were done and before the walking ones began. “Waiting for you to call,” she would answer, half kidding, and we would dive in: the morning papers (two each), the rowing and swimming ledger (five miles on the water, 1,500 meters in it), the twenty-four-hour chronicle of dramas and annoyances that bookend a day. When we’d gotten to the pond, after the phone call and before dusk, Caroline would link her arm into mine and say, “Sooo …?” as we wound around the reservoir, starting yet another sentence in the infinite conversation. According to the old rule book, men had sports and women had talking; Caroline and I cultivated both, finding that our logging of miles on river or land enhanced the internal ground we covered. And yet I find now that writing about a friendship that flourished within the realm of connection and routine has all the components of trying to capture air. The dailiness of our alliance was both muted and essential: We were the lattice that made room for the rose.

  6.

  IF COMPATIBILITY IS PART LUCK AND PART LABOR, our mettle had been tested by the summer trips we took, together and apart. More than one of those vacations turned into rescue missions. She bailed me out from a miserable, rainy couple of weeks in Truro when she showed up with a tape of The Sopranos and a bread pudding from Formaggio. I returned the favor a month later, when she and Morelli were stranded in bad weather in New Hampshire, by sending them a tape of Survivor—Caroline’s secret pleasure—by overnight mail. One year when she and Tom got to Chocorua a day or two ahead of me, she called me in Cambridge, begging me to come a day early. “You’ve got to get up here,” she whispered. “The man made me go on a nine-mile hike today. I can hardly move.”

  God forbid Tom should learn her limitations; Caroline had nearly pinned him arm wrestling the year before. I was an easier companion, at least when it came to mountain hikes; we had also learned that we could exist on parallel tracks in silent space. Early in our friendship we had gone to a house of her family’s on Gay Head on Martha’s Vineyard, in late March. The landscape on that end of the island is wild even in high summer; at the start of spring, the place was cold and desolate. It was a hard trip. There were new crops of ticks in the marshes surrounding the house, and after a run the dogs would emerge from high grass looking as though they’d been sprinkled with poppy seeds. Caroline and I bundled ourselves in sweatshirts, armed with brushes and rubbing alcohol, and sat on the floor in the waning light, combing dozens of ticks off the dogs’ coats. I had such a case of cabin fever after two days of rain that I drove twenty miles across island to swim in a hotel pool; Caroline spent most of the time I was gone talking to Morelli on the phone, distraught about the memories the house held. By the time we closed up the house and headed to Vineyard Haven for the ferry, we were both worn out and beyond any efforts at good cheer. An hour before departure, we drove the car into the long ferry queue that is part of Vineyard life, and got out with the dogs to hang around in the parking lot until we left.

  Then on the boardwalk across the way, I saw a silhouette that sent my stomach into my throat. A man was sitting on a bench reading The New York Times, and I was convinced it was Sam, the man I had split up with five years earlier—whose letters I had never answered, whom I hadn’t seen since that day I left him in an airport in another city. “Oh my God, Caroline,” I said, “that’s Sam.” She knew all the stories about this piece of pain, including the fact that he spent a lot of time on the Vineyard, and she knew with one look how unhappy I was at the prospect of running into him.

  “Hold the dogs,” she said abruptly, giving me Lucille’s leash. “Don’t freak out. I know what to do.” She moved too fast for me to respond, and so I stood there while she marched toward the man on the bench. She got within about ten yards to his right, and then yelled out his name—smiling and waving at a nonexistent person beyond him. She was acting on the assumption that if the man was Sam, we would know it immediately, because he would start in recognition; if I was mistaken and he ignored her, then we wouldn’t have to spend the next two hours dodging ghosts from the past.

  The man barely glanced her way before returning to his pa
per. But everyone else—well, Caroline was hollering and waving while no one was waving back, and she had an audience of sixty or seventy people staring at her. This was a woman so shy she could barely endure any kind of spotlight. But now she had made me laugh until my stomach hurt, and made a fool of herself in public to give me some peace. I had never loved her more than in that moment. She came striding back to where I stood, proud of her antics and glad to see me laughing. “That guy’s about a hundred years old,” she said, shrugging, and took ahold of Lucille’s leash and lit a cigarette.

  THOSE CIGARETTES. I would like to leave them out of this story but cannot. I had learned on the Vineyard trip to grant Caroline the time she needed each day for the New York Times crossword puzzle—a sine qua non for which, as the week progressed and the puzzles became harder, she required absolute silence. If you interrupted her focus she would shoot you a look of such withering scorn that it could stop a preacher in his tracks. My rules of togetherness were equally demanding. She could survive a three-hour car trip with me only by chewing nicotine gum; it was a testament to our immediate fondness for each other that I understood her smoking and she tolerated my aversion to it. I had quit four years earlier, and it had taken me years of wanting to quit before I was able, and so I knew that cultivating her desire to stop was far more effective than any threats or scare tactics I could throw her way.

  This equanimity didn’t always reign; the closer we became, the less I was able to bear her smoking. I started hollering at her on the phone one day, after I’d been pressuring her about trying to quit and she’d asked me to back off and I couldn’t, and I said something that makes me ache to remember it. “You’re eight years younger than I am,” I cried. “I don’t want to have to bury you.”

  I was hardly alone in my worry. Caroline’s mother, before she died, had begged her to stop smoking, and Caroline told me more than once that she was no match for the coalition of her sister, Becca, and me—with the pressure from the two of us, she knew she would have to quit. But she loved smoking the way my dad had loved it, with his three-pack-a-day habit that went on for decades. I had grown up with the smell of his coffee and his Camels eliciting a feeling of safety, and I knew this attachment could be a tangle of poison and desire. Most addictions, Caroline’s included, are both intricate and predictable. The ever-complicit brain turns the craving into a narrative: The cigarette or bourbon or obsessive relationship becomes the guide rope, the way we navigate the day. Caroline believed she couldn’t write without a cigarette, couldn’t endure a night or an hour within the vast caverns of a tobaccoless world. She tried nicotine gum and tried staring at photos of smokers’ lungs; she researched in-treatment facilities for nicotine addiction. And she finally managed to stop on her own, just before she had to.

  It was not a source of trouble between us, but rather of mutual distress. If Caroline and I shared some of the most idyllic times of both our lives, the core of our friendship came from the rougher excursions we endured together. From that first winter afternoon in the Harvard ball fields, “Oh no—I need you” had become an admission and a clarion call—the tenet of dependency that forms the weft of friendship. We needed each other so that we could count on the endless days of forests and flat water, but the real need was soldered by the sadder, harder moments—discord or helplessness or fear—that we dared to expose to each other.

  It took me years to grasp that this grit and discomfort in any relationship are an indicator of closeness, not its opposite. We learned to fight well and fairly from the beginning: When Tom witnessed one of our straight-on conflicts, he grabbed his book and headed up the stairs. “I grew up with sisters,” he said as he retreated. “I know where this is going.” We had great power to hurt each other, and because we acknowledged this weapon we tried never to use it. Besides the smoking, I don’t know that we ever fought about anything important. We could both be haughty and snappish and overly sensitive, and yet we forgave these traits in each other almost immediately and without much of a struggle.

  Our trust allowed for a shorthand that let us get to the point quickly. Caroline knew that when I headed toward my basement corner of worldview melancholia, it manifested itself in ways both comic and treatable. For years a lovely young Guatemalan woman cleaned my house every couple of weeks. She adored Clementine and would regularly say, “Ooh, someday I’m just going to take her with me!” One afternoon after Lilian had left, when I was feeling assaulted by life’s little treacheries, I became convinced that she was serious. In a fit of maternal anxiety, I called Caroline, who knew Lilian and her sweet, teasing spirit. “Do you think she meant it?” I asked. “I mean, really, do you think she might take her?” Caroline was kind that day—she neither laughed nor scoffed—but for years afterward, whenever I would start to go off-kilter about the world and its potential evils, all Caroline had to do for a reality check was say, with diagnostic calm, “I’m afraid Lilian is stealing the dog again.”

  These were the day-to-day dramas we confessed to each other and lessened by their expression alone. Caroline would call fretting about a potluck dinner; she was so shy, she dreaded it for days. I told her to make an appearance and duck out early; she managed to stay for eleven minutes. She speeded me up when I dawdled, and I consoled her when her hyperefficiency got her into trouble, as when she plowed ahead into a parking garage and almost took the boat rack off her car. We divided the world up into separate strengths: I was good with computers and veterinary tasks; Caroline was in charge of home repair and any feat requiring physical strength. When it came to matters of the soul and psyche, we each knew how to tend to the other. But Caroline’s range of acceptance was larger than mine, and so were her skills of diplomacy.

  PRIVATELY, AND NOT altogether in jest, we believed that all people could be consigned to dog breeds. “God, he is such an apricot poodle,” Caroline would say about someone vain or entitled, or, between her teeth, about a woman who brayed: “Beagle.” Morelli listened to us doing this during a walk one afternoon and stopped in his tracks; he had gone from amused to incredulous: “You guys are really serious about this, aren’t you?” This taxonomy became a code for human personality, and whenever anyone would wander onto our field of attention, the inevitable question became which breed he or she might be. We enjoyed making Morelli a chocolate Lab (great heart, sense of humor) and I insisted Caroline was a collie (smart, high-strung, loyal), but for years we pondered where I belonged. Finally one day at the beginning of a walk she declared her research over.

  “I’ve decided what breed you are,” she said with dry certainty. I swallowed; this was important stuff. She paused before giving me the verdict: “A young female German shepherd dog.”

  “Oh—but …” I was flustered and a little unnerved. “I mean, they’re really great dogs,” I said, “and I know they’re smart and everything. But they’re so serious. And they’re herders—they’re so bossy, they run every other dog into the ground.”

  Her smile was her answer. “Well, that’s why I made you a young female,” she said. “To soften it a little.”

  7.

  THE COMPETITION WE FOSTERED, ALONE AND TOGETHER, became a pleasure rather than a hindrance: We brought our rivalry into the light and tried to tame it. Every time I swam, I chose a lane near an unwitting opponent, preferably a man, who was faster than I; then I flung myself through my laps for the next half hour, trying to catch him. Each October after the world-class Head of the Charles regatta, Caroline would go out on the water alone and row the three-plus-mile course, timing herself to see where she fell in her age and weight group. The race itself was too nerve-racking for her, and she didn’t care about competing publicly. Like me, she set an anonymous golden mean and raced against it.

  Caroline always said that she and her sister had navigated their shared terrain by divvying up the goods. “Becca got math and science, I got English and history,” she liked to say, and we did something similar with our curriculum in the writing life: Our sublimation within the sa
fer realm of athletics allowed us to bolster each other professionally. According to our unspoken rule, Caroline was the columnist and I was the critic; she wrote about the personal and psychological, while I claimed the province of analysis and interpretation. It helped that I was older, and that we both loved our work and had been rewarded in kind. I think we were each good enough at what we did that we could applaud, mostly unequivocally, the other’s victories.

  When one of us was the clear superior, it softened the odds—it took the pressure off the other’s Inner Marine. You will always be the better rower, I told her one summer, with relief; that meant I could actually relax and let her train me. And rowing was the shared Eden that allowed us unbridled effort and victory, whatever the race. Caroline’s willowy prowess on the water testified to years of work, and she took unabashed pride in this accomplishment: One of life’s grace notes had been the morning when Harry Parker, legendary oarsman and Harvard crew coach, spotted Caroline on the river and gave her a thumbs-up in front of his amateur eights, then had her demonstrate her stroke. In winter, desolate at the long season when the river was frozen, Caroline retired to the gym, where she had been known to do stomach crunches with a ten-pound weight on her chest. Weaker but only slightly less fanatical, I nearly killed myself trying to do the plough (a contortionist’s back stretch) on my kitchen floor, simply because Caroline had shown it to me that afternoon on the asphalt path at Fresh Pond. In the offseason, I joined Gold’s Gym, listening to the male weight lifters make primate noises while I suffered through a half hour on the indoor rowing machines. Walking the icy trails of January, we fantasized about winter-sport possibilities: Was it too late in life to take up the luge? By the time New England’s erratic spring arrived, we were pawing the ground like crazed horses. We knew that thrashing around on the water during a cold and windy March could be frustrating and even foolish.