by Margot Kahn
The morning I arrived in Iowa, a woman named Candace was giving away a nearly full bag of Purina diabetic cat food, a post she concluded with three exclamation points, and by that afternoon she had returned, offering a jumbo pack of Pampers and coupons for Enfamil baby formula, this time with just one exclamation point.
In the days that followed, I unpacked, bought Finn some new chew toys, and went to get my new university ID. Meanwhile, Candace offered up one baby stroller, an almost-full container of Herbalife Cookies and Cream shake mix, and a George Foreman Grill. In return, she asked if anyone had the Weight Watchers Complete Food and Dining Out book, confiding that she planned to start dieting that week.
I was fascinated by the way her posts could construct a life, or, I now realize, how I convinced myself I could construe a life based on this stranger’s posts. I knew almost no one in town then and Candace felt like a way in, a way to understand the landscape and understand myself within it. I pictured her in her mid-thirties, hair bleached to the sheen of corn silk, just a few pounds plump of shapely with feet that turned out slightly penguin style when she walked. She seemed stable in a way I didn’t feel then. And for a little while, she was frozen like that: this caricature of a self-sufficient Midwestern mother I had invented to fill this flat, Midwestern landscape I was coming to know.
But then two days before my classes began, Candace posted again, and her offer this time was for “Ashley,” her six-year-old, loyal, and mostly house-broken Jack Russell–Rat Terrier mix.
“We have a 6-month old son that is allergic to both our cat (which we are also trying to get rid of) and our dog!” she wrote. “I am extremely upset that I have to post this ad… but I have to for the sake of my little boy.”
That same week, I lost Finn for the first time. I was in a new graduate student teacher training—learning how best to teach Iowa students Shakespeare, how exactly to handle their Midwestern tendency to avoid dissension—when I got a call from a stranger who said he’d found my dog wandering the streets and that he was taking him to the pound. When I arrived for him an hour later, Finn’s muzzle was wet with nervous drool and he had a temporary pink leash around his neck. I distracted myself from crying on the drive back by lecturing Finn about the importance of staying close to home. But that afternoon, back at the training session, I cried despite myself when another graduate student showed a clip from a cheesy movie called In Her Shoes in which Cameron Diaz reads Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “One Art” to a blind man.
“The art of losing’s not too hard to master,” Diaz read Bishop. “Though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.”
Finn was a mix-breed, just like Ashley, only he had the lithe body of a pointer and the energy of a black Lab. He’d found me while I was running through the streets of Houston one morning and followed me a mile back to my house, then waited patiently outside my door for an hour when I told him that, No, I couldn’t take care of a dog, not even one as sweet as he was. But eventually, of course, I let him in. And he’d been mine ever since.
After I took Finn in, he began running with me. We ran through Houston’s smog, in and out of Iowa City’s forested parks, and, then, back in Texas, we kept running through the flat, crosshatched neighborhoods of Lubbock.
But in Iowa this time, I no longer run. Pregnancy stole my energy in the early months, and, now that I have my stamina back, my body feels too rounded and off-center to run, so I walk instead. Every morning while Marta and our daughter eat breakfast, I go out alone to walk through Iowa City’s neighborhoods and, though I don’t tell anyone, it’s my favorite part of the day. Just like running with Finn used to be my favorite part.
It’s been raining a lot this summer—a lot more than when we lived here before—and so often I pass over small bridges spanning swollen creeks and I love the way our movement intersects at that point, me walking across their running waters. I like, too, when chance takes me past someone else walking or running a dog.
I’ve never been good at approaching strangers, so usually I don’t pet these dogs, but I want to with my whole body. This is another change that’s come with pregnancy. When I want something, my desire doesn’t stem from a small concentrated spot in my heart or stomach or groin; instead it overtakes me. And when I see dogs walking with their owners, I want to pet them with such an intensity that, when in the end I don’t, I walk away feeling bowed with loss.
The desire began recently while we were having dinner with some friends here that Marta knew from before. They’re a younger couple with two daughters, just like we will soon have two daughters, and they also now have a small black puppy who looks a lot like Finn did a long time ago.
I should have been playing with the kids or talking to Marta’s friends that night, but I spent most of the evening wrestling and then snuggling their new puppy. When it was time to go, I kept making excuses to stay just a little longer, to pet her furry wriggling body just one more time. She was so soft and eager to be loved.
I knew why I was doing that, of course. But it was still surprising. It’s been seven months since Finn died, six months since I got pregnant—again—after losing a previous pregnancy to miscarriage two months before that. I had thought I’d come to accept the exchange by now: a loss for a gain. But, of course, it’s never that simple.
I wondered sometimes why I grew so attached to Candace in my first few months in Iowa, except that: latching on to the lives of strangers and using them to try to understand my own life and the changes to come. I watch people in airports, I read the classifieds, I eavesdrop when the opportunity arises. In some ways, Candace felt to me like a parallel life. Like she was who I could have been, if only I would stay put.
Even after I had all the stuff I needed, I kept checking Freecycle those first few weeks and months in Iowa because I wanted to know what would happen to her—to her pets, her son, her stuff.
A couple days after she posted about Ashley, the dog, Candace returned with an ad for her cat, Chooey, who she was also giving away because of her baby boy’s allergies. She repeated her story for those, unlike me, who hadn’t been reading since the beginning.
“She is a very good cat and has never given us any reason to get rid of her,” Candace told us. “Which is why we are upset!”
The leaves began to turn. I started a supper club with new friends, and Candace posted asking if anyone had an aquarium for her family’s new pet salamander—which she called the “perfect replacement pet.” A week later, she offered up the baby bathtub her son had just outgrown and asked if anyone had a toddler bath chair.
A few weeks later, Candace posted about Ashley again. She said her dog had found a new home, though not through Freecycle. Her parents had agreed to take in the Terrier mix, which was good news, she wrote, because now her son would grow up knowing the dog that could have been his.
Winter fell, my first in Iowa, and I finally decided to write Candace. I couldn’t know then that within six months I would meet Marta or that, less than three years later, we would marry and Marta give birth to our first child or that, three months after that, we would move away from Iowa for good.
What I knew then was that after so much investment in a stranger’s life, I wanted closure—or maybe contact. I wanted to know how this would all end.
“I know this is a little late,” I wrote to Candace. “But I wondered if you found a home for Chooey the cat? I have a friend who isn’t on Freecycle but is thinking about adopting a cat and wants to take one that really needs a home.”
It was a lie, of course. I had no such friend, but it was the only excuse I could think of to write and ask this stranger about her life. When Candace finally replied, her message was short and, as always, upbeat.
“Chooey found a new, loving home a couple of months ago,” she gushed before, always considerate, adding: “Good luck in your search!”
Rebecca Solnit once wrote that places are more constant than people can ever be. Friedrich Nietzsche proposed the idea of eternal return: t
hat time cycles rather than runs straight toward the horizon. Milan Kundera claimed that dogs link us to paradise.
I think about this baby growing inside me sometimes and the place she’s in now. They say that after birth, we’re left with the constant desire to return. That in utero is our only paradise, the only moment when every need is met and nothing has yet been lost.
With Finn, I was most at home on the road. We probably took a dozen road trips in our time together. We slept in a rest stop in my Subaru outside a Louisiana swamp. We stayed in a cabin beside the grave of Bonnie and Clyde. We drove up to see my sister after she got out of rehab and down to see my mom soon after her mom died. And, of course, wherever we went, we ran.
For our final trip, when I took Finn to the vet to be put down, Marta offered to go with me, but I wanted to be alone. He’d been sick for at least a year by then. I was pregnant for the first time, not yet aware that the fetus’s heartbeat was about to stop.
On the drive to the vet’s office, I talked to Finn the whole way. I told him that I loved him and that he would always be my best friend. He was in the back, lying on my daughter’s duck towel, which I’d put there to soak up the urine he could no longer keep from leaking out of him.
The woman at the front desk checked us in, and while we waited to be called, I pet his soft ears and told him how glad I was to have found him, that he found me.
After they injected him with liquid that would make his heart stop, they left me alone with him, and I watched as his eyes turned blue and then, slowly, became glass. I felt his chest and his heart was still there, moving like a small baby inside him. Until it wasn’t, and I left.
We were walking to an old friend’s house for dinner last night and there was a woman walking her dog in front of us. It had finally stopped raining here and Iowa City looked just like it used to, even though I knew it wasn’t. My daughter asked about the dog in front of us and then added, “Where is our dog?”
“Don’t you remember?” I said. “Finn got old and he was sick and sometimes when animals get old and sick, they die. He’s not ours anymore.”
We’ve told her this story before, probably a dozen times. But she never seems to remember, or at least she doesn’t remember what it means.
Three-year-olds see the world like that. We are in both Lubbock and Iowa City. Today is yesterday and tomorrow could be next summer. We once had a dog named Finn and we still have him. He’s just not ours anymore.
Sarah Viren is the author of Mine, winner of the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Book Prize, and translator of the Argentine novella Córdoba Skies by Federico Falco. Her poetry and prose have appeared in AGNI, Iowa Review, Gettysburg Review, TriQuarterly, and other magazines. She holds an MFA from the University of Iowa and a PhD from Texas Tech University. She is an assistant professor of creative writing and literature at Arizona State University.
Subjunctive
Naima Coster
Let’s say your name is Brian. We met at college, a very good one, near my hometown. And let’s say we decided early on that we wanted very much of each other, for as long as either of us would allow. Let’s say we got married. Let’s say there was a dog. Let’s say you found a job, and we left my hometown for the South. We found a blue house that we don’t own but that feels ours, especially when you rake the leaves, or we set out a pot of mums in the garden even though it’s autumn and growing cold, or I call the gas company, and the truck comes, and they fill our tank. To live in the woods, down a gravel road, to call the gas man and say how many gallons of propane we need, makes us believe we are much older than we are. We aren’t. We made our gambles on each other young.
Let’s say we are happy with one another. Let’s say this happiness is new. It contradicts all we have learned about what it means to be alive. Our not-happiness was old, familiar, fibrillar, as much a part of us as the color of your eyes, the kink in my hair, my mother, your mother, the generations we cannot name. Our way of living is obscene, but we go on with our sweetness, our quiet that may last.
You are beautiful—this is not a metaphor—and you grew up in a sun-filled place. Let’s say you still learned darkness. Let’s say your father drank, and once you broke down the door to the bathroom, where your father lay, so you could wrest the bottle away. Let’s say it was your mother who called you to push. Let’s say you were ten.
I was not beautiful, and I spent time in the bathroom, too, but no one came knocking for me. I was small, and I shut myself away so that the only harm came to me would be by my own hand, and by metal—safety pins, single-edged blades, pretty carbon steel.
Let’s say we are not who we were. Let’s say those days are behind us, up north. No one knows us in our country town; we left no address. Here we go for walks through mud and trees. We dirty our boots, find spider webs netted in our hair. In the summer we get too much rain; we learn to drive through the thunder. We talk about travel—there is a highway we could ride straight to the ocean; there is another that pulls west toward the mountains. Let’s say there is no need to weep here, unless we are talking about how much we know, or seem to know now, and how little we knew.
There are daily blunders in our daily love. You say my socks smell funny, and I hear Dirty. You keep me waiting in the car, and I remember, Waste. You say you want to go for a drive on your own to see the changing colors of the leaves, and I am pursued: Leech.
Let’s say I am still that girl in the bathroom. Let’s say you still knock down the door.
When we plot about our children, we overlook the combined misfortune of our DNA, the nuclear not-happiness to which we did not consent. We wonder instead what it is like to be born into a little blue house, at the bottom of a gravel road. Their luck occurs to us when we are laughing in the car, or drying the dishes, making another pot of coffee, turning out the lights. We string a tree with secondhand ornaments, and kiss, listen to the usual songs. We put our arms around each other and ask: Will we hate them for their joy?
We talk too about dying, about leaving our kids too soon. Our cells must be very old, and there’s no telling, Brian, whose mitochondria look worse. We’ll explain it to the children with science. It’s what history does to the brain, we will say. And the lungs. The heart. My old hometown, your sun-filled place. Our two bathrooms. We would like to go on, in our blue house, with our imaginary children, and the dog, long after the twelve months of our fixed-term lease. But there is nothing the body does not remember. A skinny shoulder shoved against a door. The tip of a needle pressed into tender skin. It is science, we will tell them. It is our cells.
A diagram—
My mother bloodied her fists on the face of every girl who called her father a murderer. She fought and learned how bloodied fists could quiet a child.
Your great-grandfather had his picture in the paper because he was struck dead by a bus. Someone in the crowd took a photograph, and your mother carried the clipping with her to the orphanage, after her own father died, at thirty-five. (His cells must have been very old.)
An indigenous woman gave birth in the mountains, driven out of the city by the white man for whom she worked. Her baby bore his green eyes, his way of seeing folded into your genetic code—
My mother’s mother sold stolen jewelry to her neighbors; she worshipped pale-skinned statues of the saints. She wore lipstick and boiled rice, danced in the living room of her railroad apartment in a new country, unaware of the tumors filling her uterus. Only the saints knew she would soon be dead—
An uncle who drank himself to death in a hotel room—
A grandfather who carved his name into a prison wall, and the son who followed after him and found his father’s name etched in the stone—
A little sister split open by a child, and then another, and another; two of them survive—
A bottle and dirt under your father’s fingernails—
A man who cheated and a man who cheated and a man who cheated, and all the women who stayed—
The grubby tile
and my pretty carbon steel—
The radishes you grew in a garden in your sun-filled place.
Let’s say we get tattoos to tally our losses so that our skins can carry them instead of us. Ink numbers on our forearms. Anyone can live with a four, a five, a six. Let’s say there is a bridge from your number to mine.
The bottom of our road is lonesome, and the trees are tall. The sounds of the forest grant us cover—the deer chewing sticks on the lawn; the wave of wind in the trees; the clattering of pinecones; the scrape of a car across gravel. Let’s say that only we can hear if I am weeping, if you are knocking on the door. Marriage is an ear pressed to the door.
We rake the leaves, and fill the tank, and we believe that they won’t ever come. Let’s say there is an end. Let’s say that we have reached it. There are too many rocks; the hedges too thick. They will not find us here. This is the South, and our windows are shuttered. We have changed our faces, installed new locks. Even now the dog is in the yard, running circles in the mud.
Naima Coster is the author of Halsey Street, a novel about gentrification, family, and memory in Brooklyn, New York. She is a graduate of the Columbia University MFA program and also holds degrees in English and Creative Writing from Yale University and Fordham University. Her stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Arts & Letters, Kweli, The Rumpus, and Guernica, among other places. Naima has taught writing in a range of settings, from prison to after-school programs, summer camps, and universities. She lives in Durham, North Carolina, with her husband and their dog.
Cold, Comfort
Miranda Weiss
When I originally moved to Alaska, twenty-four years old and with a boyfriend I had no specific long-term plans with, my mother didn’t try to stop me. She wouldn’t have had much of an argument, having left her native England to move across the ocean with my father at roughly the same age, but she had experience enough to warn me.