“That goddamn dog,” she had said at last, giving in. “All this over a dog.”
Tasha couldn’t figure out whether Isabel truly loved dogs, or generally found them convenient to use as leverage when she had a point to make. When Tasha was fifteen, Isabel had promised to buy her a dog if she lost ten pounds. This was the first time Isabel had tried to exercise Tasha, to get the weight off. She had pointed out that Tasha’s baby fat was blossoming into full-fledged adult flab. She had consulted with Tasha’s pediatrician, Dr. Solomon, behind closed doors, then returned with a weight-loss plan, a 1,200-calorie-a-day diet. This was also the first time Tasha ever realized that people were looking at her, that they were seeing something different from what she saw when she looked at herself. Her body had become the subject of medical scrutiny. Even then, Tasha had been reluctant to follow her mother’s orders, though she was equally inefficient at outright rebellion. Her way was to follow along, sort of. To do what she liked, sort of. It was difficult to respect yourself when you lived along such margins.
Isabel had come upon the dog bribe when six months had passed and Tasha had lost only two pounds. Isabel couldn’t get to the bottom of Tasha’s eating strategies. “I know you’re cheating,” she would say. “I don’t know how, but I will crack this.” Her will was formidable, but her logic skills were, for some unaccountable reason, quite clumsy. “How are you cheating? How?” she kept asking. It escaped her that she was dealing with an expert. Isabel called around to various dog breeders, took copious notes, and told Tasha that if she lost just ten pounds, the puppy she had been begging for since she was five would be hers. But much as Tasha wanted it—and she did want it very badly—she came to a stop at six pounds. The more vehemently she told herself that she was almost at the goal and that she mustn’t, mustn’t eat badly, the less able she was to control her cravings. She had taken to sneaking down to the kitchen after her parents were in bed and pouring herself a bowl of Cheerios sprinkled with brown sugar, then washing the bowl and putting it back in the cupboard so no one could guess what had happened. At one Saturday morning weigh in, she had not lost a pound, but gained two. Isabel held up the dog magazines and information packages from breeders and dumped them ceremoniously in the garbage.
“We never had a dog,” Tasha said to Alan, “but I did want one—desperately, in fact. You were very lucky, to have had one for a time.”
Alan returned to the couch. “She was a good dog. She was very loyal, although I’m sure it doesn’t sound that way.”
“What do I know about dogs? I’ve never had one, after all.”
She had put out an appetizer plate of raw vegetables, a suggestion made by Isabel, who had been shocked to hear that Tasha could want to see Alan again, after the cheese situation. She gave Tasha menu suggestions, which Tasha took in spite of herself. When she ate in front of men, she always restricted herself to healthy food. She had in the oven a roast chicken and root vegetables.
While they ate, the dog lay at Tasha’s feet. (Alan had finally, after much coaxing, let the dog be and allowed it to wander where it wanted.) He was immensely appreciative of the chicken, which was overcooked, and he claimed it to be the best roast chicken he had ever tasted. He insisted that he preferred chicken a little bit dry, a quirk left over from childhood. Relaxing, he also admitted that, when he was a child, he wouldn’t eat egg salad with mayonnaise but loved egg salad made with water. He and his mother and sister would go on picnics at a conservation area not too far from where they lived, and his mother would produce from a wicker basket two separate versions of egg salad sandwiches, as well as frozen peas, chocolate chip cookies without the chocolate chips, and watered-down milk. He and his sister would go tearing around her in circles, whooping in excitement.
“If you like your food with water,” Tasha said, “then it stands to reason that you wouldn’t like your chicken dry.”
“What can I say? I was a weird kid. I also made my mother wring out my steaks so they were good and dry too.”
He was the kind of adult who was difficult to picture as a child—unlike herself, whom she imagined to be still very close to that apple-cheeked, frizzy-hair girl who liked her egg salad with as much mayonnaise as possible. She had altogether forgotten that she had slept with this man, that they had lain naked together (naked, but expertly arranged under a sheet) in his roomy king-sized bed. There was a distance, not uncomfortable, between them. It was a kind distance, warm, the benevolent distance that exists when discovery lies ahead. She had forgotten the cheese on his lip. He had eaten every mouthful of dinner with deliberation, a kind of cautious relish, as if he were eating a rich dessert. He was methodical and calm, concentrating, and watching him filled her with an affection and gratitude. He was very much unlike her, and she liked him very much.
She told him about her job teaching Shakespeare workshops, and he was impressed that she had tried to be an actor. He believed it was brave, so she didn’t tell him that it was the opposite, that she couldn’t figure out what to do with her life, and that acting felt less like work than any other job she could come up with. Of the workshops, she told him, “I worry. Should they let me near the kids when sometimes all I want to do is say to them, ‘Do you have any idea how stupid you are? Do you know that you might be the stupidest person I’ve ever met in my life?’ I would never say that, of course, but I fantasize.” She told stories of how noisy and disobedient the students were, how they disrupted the class by making bird noises or giggling maliciously, although as she spoke, she felt guilty that she was unable to represent anything as it was, that in telling stories she always misplaced the truth of them. So she told him about how she worried sometimes that she had never had a passion for any work she had done.
He said, “You’re still young. You have so much time to find out what you have passion for.”
“Nevertheless,” she said. “Well, no, not nevertheless. I’m not so young. If I had passion for something, I’d surely have a sense of that by the age of thirty.”
“If you had no passion in you, you wouldn’t worry about that.” He reached across the table and touched the hair at her temple.
The dog started paddling at the door.
“She needs to go out. Smudge-Fanny,” he called, holding out the leash, “Fanny-Smudge, come. She doesn’t really look like a Smudge. I don’t know if this name is going to take.”
“I have to be honest,” Tasha said. “I don’t understand why you want to name this dog after a dog who ran away from you and who, presumably, died doing so.” She was laughing. She thought it could be funny, if she got her tone right.
He took the dog out, to the small park across the street, and she watched him from the window. When he returned (to her relief— she had imagined him walking on, into the darkness beyond the trees), he sat down in the middle of the couch and said, “I don’t know why I’m bent on naming this dog Smudge. It was a name we all came up with together, my family. We absolutely loved that dog. Especially my mother. We didn’t neglect her. It was that my sister died. We thought that was why she ran away. Or that had something to do with it, somehow.”
She did like ferreting out information when she suspected secrets were being held. She had been pushing for something, a story, though certainly not this one.
He told her that his sister had died when she was ten and he was thirteen. She had been killed in a snowmobile accident at a friend’s winter chalet in northern Ontario. The girls were taking turns riding on an inner tube behind a snowmobile driven by the friend’s older brother. On his sister’s ride, the brother made a sharp turn on a plain of ice, sending her flying off and directly through a line of flimsy young trees that had been planted just that fall. He said that they had been travelling at such speed that the force of his sister’s body had been so strong as to bend the fledgling tree trunks back into perfect arches to the ground. Uncooperative and fighting for breath, she was flown by helicopter to Sick Children’s Hospital, and she died from her injuries several hours
later.
The dog had run away a month or two later. Some people speculated that it went looking for her, and some people thought it couldn’t bear the sorrow in the house.
His mother had been a tall, Nordic type, fair-skinned and hearty and sensible. She lost twenty pounds in the months that followed, and she spent all her time reading novels in her bedroom. The only time she refused to be in the bedroom was at night. For two years, she slept in a rocking chair in the kitchen. Alan had heard his parents arguing about this. One night when he was fifteen, he came home late to find her there, curled up in the rocker with the engravings from the back of the chair pressed into her cheek like pillow creases. When he touched her, she tried to pretend that she had fallen asleep there by accident while reading. This was her nature, he said.
“I suppose it doesn’t make sense that I would want to name the dog Smudge,” Alan said. “Considering.”
“No,” Tasha said. “But then, maybe yes.”
“My mother still spends all her time reading novels,” he said. “I know this because I’ve caught her. But if you were to arrive at her house, you would never guess. You would think she was the happiest person you’d ever met.”
In Tasha’s favourite stories and novels, mothers often spent all their time reading. These mothers were contented and self-contained, nurturing independent inner lives. They were marvellously and benignly neglectful, and Tasha had spent most of her life wishing her own mother were like this. She had thought of maternal escape as a delightful thing, an assertion of freedom, the quiet battle with indomitable children won. It hadn’t occurred to her that such mothers might be hiding for other reasons—not a shirking of duty, but duty’s purest expression, protecting their children from themselves.
Alan told her that his mother made him dozens of plastic containers filled with food. He did not say that such a thing could be a burden, but it was there, in his voice.
She told him then about the exercising. “My mother prefers to take my food away,” she said, laughing just a little.
By then, they were sitting close on the couch. He didn’t say, “A curvy body can be an asset if you dress it properly.” He didn’t say, “I prefer a woman with meat on her bones.” He didn’t say, “I think fashion models are disgusting.”
What he said, softly, was “You have a laugh that could move mountains.”
She closed her eyes and thought she might cry.
Funny, the things that could get through.
YEARS LATER, Tasha still sometimes thinks of this night. It has taken on great meaning, not because she expected to end up with Alan at the end of it, but because she didn’t expect it. They had lain awake all night with the dog sleeping soundly at their feet. He had paid much attention to the soft-skinned underside of her arms. But she would never have guessed. She hadn’t prepared for good fortune. It continues to amaze her how her life could change course so abruptly and so quietly, without her own jubilant, terrified readiness.
Isabel called Tasha at ten o’clock the following morning. She and Alan were just eating the breakfast he had prepared, pancakes with fresh blueberries and real maple syrup.
“Did you enjoy sleeping in?” Isabel asked. “I’m assuming you did, without me banging down your door.”
Tasha said that she had.
“Well, I’m happy to tell you that you can get used to it,” said Isabel. “From now on, I’m going to exercise with Rita. I know I should let you be. I will let you be.”
How suddenly Tasha’s burdens had lifted then. How surprising, what settled in their place. Not joy, crazy release, a glimpse of her coveted independence, but something else altogether—disorienting calm, a freedom that felt remarkably like sadness.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am grateful to the many people who have supported me along the way: Jill Bridge, Edward Bridge, Philippa Bridge-Cook, and Jeremy Bridge-Cook; John Maxwell, Mark Rogers, and Ken Hunt for being the best first readers and most caring critics I could have imagined; the Toronto Arts Council and my understanding employers at Humber College; and especially Elisabeth Harvor, whose brilliance and encouragement, quite simply, changed my life.
Versions of these stories first appeared in Toronto Life, Descant, PRISM international, Prairie Fire, The Journey Prize Anthology 17, and 05: Best Canadian Stories. Thanks to the editors of these publications, and in particular to Camilla Gibb.
Thanks to my editor, Jennifer Glossop, and to my agent, Anne McDermid.
And most of all, with gratitude beyond words, to Peter Wambera, for being extraordinary.
The Virgin Spy Page 21