Ellen stayed at the window. She didn’t have to get to work until ten, and even then it didn’t really matter if she was late. The dog had its mouth open and was panting, even though it wasn’t hot outside. Ellen wondered if he was thirsty. He probably didn’t live around here and had been wandering around trying to find his way home, and now he was too tired to go any farther. Maybe hungry too.
Ellen filled a plastic bowl from the cupboard with water. She opened the refrigerator and took out the leftover casserole, beef and noodles. She cut a big square of it and put it on a paper plate and set it in the microwave to take the refrigerator chill off. They had lunch meat, ham, and Ellen laid some of that on the plate, along with a couple of pieces of cheese that she peeled loose from their plastic wrapping. They had never had dogs in the house, so she wasn’t sure what they ate, except dog food.
She carried the water to the front door, set it down, and went back for the plate of food. Then she opened the door just enough to look out. The dog hadn’t moved. Ellen waited to see if it was going to run at her and try to bite, but it just turned its black kangaroo-shaped nose in her direction, in a polite way, as if not wanting to ignore her. Ellen put the bowl and the plate a few steps out on the front walk. “Here you go.”
Ellen went back in the house and shut the door. She watched as the dog appeared to think about getting up, then scrambled to its feet and came up the front walk. It put its nose into the food and ate it in big smacking gulps. It lapped up the water, then went back to the paper plate to lick it clean. When it was done, it nosed around the evergreens beneath the window. Its curled tail stuck out from the bushes like a handle.
Ellen left the window to put the food away in the kitchen, and when she came back, the dog was gone, on its way home, Ellen hoped. It was best that it not be here when Sheila returned from work, since Sheila really was somebody who would call a dogcatcher, then call again if they didn’t come fast enough.
Ellen went upstairs and lay down in bed and looked at the ceiling until she was tired of looking. The only times she could do nothing was when Sheila wasn’t around. Sheila used words like “interactions” and “engaged,” words she had been taught to use. Ellen was not supposed to live in her own head, since that had turned out to be a bad neighborhood. When Sheila was home, Ellen always had to be occupied with something, watching television or reading a magazine or making a mess out of her latest handcraft project. She couldn’t get any of them to turn out right, knitting, embroidery, even plain sewing. She got bored with them, and sometimes she tied knots in the yarn, or put in a trail of stitches out to the edge of a pillowcase just to see what Sheila would say, and Sheila always said, “That’s very nice, Ellen.” The handcrafts had been Sheila’s idea. The word for this was “therapeutic.”
Sheila had moved back into the house after their mother died, so there would be somebody to take care of Ellen, but really because she and her husband did not want to live together anymore and the Church did not allow divorce. Sheila was not her only sister, but the others lived farther away and were okay with being married, so Ellen was stuck with her.
It wasn’t like she needed anybody to take care of her. She wasn’t stupid, only crazy, ha ha. It was more like, other people required explanations and reassurances.
Ellen’s job was at the thrift shop run by Saint Brendan’s, sorting the donated clothes. Ellen was not welcome in church itself after the terrible things she had said about Father Harvey that time, things that had not really happened, it was explained to her, except inside her head. The thrift shop was a good fit for her, Sheila said, because she could walk to it, she didn’t have to dress up, and the people there were used to her, meaning, they knew she took crazy pills. It was all right being there, but it wasn’t the kind of job you could get excited about.
She left the house by the back door, like she always did, and she didn’t see the dog until she had started off down the alley. It must have been hanging around in the front yard and had to catch up with her. It trotted out from behind a garage and stood in her path, waiting. Ellen stopped and she and the dog looked each other over. The dog wasn’t panting anymore, but its red mouth hung open, because it was either smiling or getting ready to bite.
“Hey dog,” Ellen said, and it wagged its big tail. She took a step toward it and it came up to her and sniffed her legs. Was it still hungry? She’d made herself two sandwiches for lunch, one ham and one peanut butter. She opened her lunch sack and held out half the ham sandwich to it. The dog reached out and took it in its mouth, but not in an especially snappy way. More like, it would have had good manners if it wasn’t so hungry.
When it finished the ham sandwich it looked up at Ellen and wagged its tail again. It had brown eyes with light-colored lashes, and a hopeful expression. Up close, there was gray in its face. Ellen took out half the peanut butter sandwich and again the dog ate it down, coughing a little, probably because the peanut butter got stuck in its throat.
“That’s all I got,” Ellen said, though that wasn’t entirely true. She set off down the alley and the dog trotted along at her side. She guessed the dog was all right, at least it wasn’t going to bite. It didn’t have a collar. Was it a wild dog? Did they have wild dogs in town? Did they live in the park? Even in winter? Where in the park? It wasn’t like they had caves or anything. It was going to be winter pretty soon, and winter was cold, a time of dark and deadness. When people died they got whittled down to bones, don’t think that don’t think that, but not before the nasty, decomposing part. Eventually everything and everyone died, all of nature and people too, tribes nations civilizations planets the whole universe! A reverse explosion, a Big Bang of sucking nothingness!
But this was brain drain thinking or actually more of a brain blender where everything got mishmashed together and the flopping panic rose up in her throat and she just had to stop it all and breathe, and look around her, and see that she was right where she was meant to be, crossing the street on the way to work, the brown dog going along at her side like he had a job of his own to get to.
Her pills didn’t always work like they were supposed to, but she knew better than to tell anyone that.
The thrift shop was in an old brick house. Ellen walked around back to the loading dock, where people dropped off their donations. The dumpster was here too, and a hose spigot but no hose. She poked around under the loading dock where sometimes things ended up, and found an enamel pan. She filled this with water and set it off to one side, where there was still some of the old yard’s grass. “Well, I have to go to work now,” she told the dog. It lifted its nose and gave her an expectant look, so she patted it twice on the top of its flattened head. It had a good feel, a furry feel. “Bye,” she said.
Mrs. Markey ran the thrift shop. She was one of those big-smile people. “Good morning, Ellen,” she sang out, every day when Ellen came in, like this was something to be really happy about. Mrs. Markey wore a blue smock with a cross and “Saint Brendan’s” embroidered on it. “Isn’t it a beautiful day? I just love this time of year, with the leaves turning and the air all crisp. Don’t you?”
“Sure,” Ellen said. She didn’t much notice weather.
“I should let you get started,” Mrs. Markey said, as if she and Ellen had been having some delightful, extended chat.
The donated clothes arrived stuffed into plastic garbage bags or paper sacks, or sometimes just wads and heaps of them left on the loading dock. Ellen wore rubber gloves and tossed some of them into the rag bin, others into the different carts meant for children, men, and women. The carts went to the laundry room and the clothes were loaded into the giant washers and dryers and then folded or placed on hangers. Sometimes the clothes needed mending, and those were set aside. Sometimes fancy or unusual items came in, party dresses or leather jackets, and these were put on a special garment rack.
On occasion, when Ellen had found some of these fancy clothes first, she folded
them up small and hid them under her coat and took them home with her. She didn’t have any good clothes anymore; the pills made you gain weight, and nothing fit. But in the back of her closet she had a collection of net petticoats trimmed with ribbon, and a lace dress with a neckline in the shape of a heart, a skirt that glittered with sequins, plus filmy scarves and blouses, jeweled shoes, and a pair of long red leather gloves. Sheila would have said, “Now where in the world do you plan on wearing any of that?”
Ellen didn’t think much about the dog while she worked. The pills made it hard to concentrate and there were so many things that could send you off in a different direction. These socks? These sad, busted drawers? All day long, humiliated garments passed through her hands. And while she knew that the craziest part of her crazy was believing that things meant more than they did, where did you draw the line? Did the lost, the broken, the distressed, count for nothing? Save me save me save me, each one said, as she hesitated over the rag bin. Then Mrs. Markey or somebody else poked their head in and said something that needed a certain kind of answer: prompt, cheery, yoo-hoo! Ellen mumbled and stumbled and people got that regretful, wise expression.
Ellen left at four o’clock to go home. She looked around for the dog, and right away he crawled out from underneath the loading dock, wagging his tail like they were old pals. “Hey,” Ellen told him, “I’m thinking we should get you some real dog food, what do you say?” And the dog did a kind of happy dance, kicking up with his back legs and then his front legs, like he understood everything and thought it was a good idea.
So they set off down the street to the grocery, the dog staying right at her side, stopping when she stopped, then starting up again. Ellen told him to wait while she went into the store. The grocery! Some days it was full of shouting colors and products on the shelves that reached out to you like the tentacles of seaweed but of course not seaweed. Today she was in a hurry. She propelled her cart through the aisles and bought two kinds of bagged dog food, in case he didn’t like one of them, and a box of dog cookies in the shape of bones. She got a package of hamburger, because they could both eat that.
The checker put it all in two plastic sacks, and when Ellen got outside again she opened the box of cookies and gave the dog one, and then another. There was something you could enjoy about feeding a dog. They were so appreciative. “Let’s get on home,” she told him, and the dog was ready for that, sure.
They were still a couple of blocks from the house when Ellen saw the boys. She could have crossed the street but then they would too. They were the kind of boys who picked on people, and Ellen was always right there for that, wasn’t she, fat and slow and weird. They weren’t that old, twelve or thirteen, but they egged each other on and their favorite thing in life was meanness. Sheila always said to pay them no mind.
Today there were four of them. They saw Ellen too, and they lined themselves up, two on either side of the sidewalk, so she’d have to pass through them. Ellen put her head down. She had a grocery sack in each hand and she tightened her grip. Sometimes they tried to take things from her. The dog looked up at her, asking a dog question. “Pay them no mind,” Ellen told him.
When she got closer, one of them said, “Hey, is that your dog?”
Ellen nodded. She kept putting one foot in front of the other.
“He sure is ugly. I guess that figures.”
“Hey, what’s his name?”
They’d closed in around her on the sidewalk. There was no getting past them. “Prince,” Ellen said. She didn’t know why she said it. It just seemed like his name.
“Prince!” They whistled and pretended to be impressed.
“So does that make you a princess?”
“I guess,” Ellen said.
The boys hooted. The one who had spoken was the biggest one. He had red hair and a flattened nose. He said, “Prince and Princess . . .” And you could see him trying to come up with the meanest, snottiest thing to say . . . “Of Butt-Ugly-landia!”
“That’s stupid,” Ellen said.
They weren’t expecting that. She usually didn’t say much to them. “She just called you stupid, stupid,” one of the other boys said.
The red-haired boy took another step toward Ellen but stopped and looked down. The dog had lifted a back leg and was peeing in a steady stream down the boy’s pants and sogging up his tennis shoe.
The boy yelped and shook his foot and said, “Fuck! What the fuck!” The other boys hooted. The red-haired boy whirled around and made as if to hit somebody, either Ellen or the dog or the boys laughing, and that’s when the dog lunged at him, barking and showing his teeth and bristling so that the hair on his back stood straight up.
“I’ll get you for this, bitch!” But they were running away and taking their nasty talk with them. And then they were gone. “Nice work, Prince,” Ellen said, and he sniffed at the sidewalk where the boys had been and peed some more on the same spot.
There was going to be a whole Sheila thing to get through, but she wasn’t back from work yet. Ellen took two plastic dishes from the kitchen, one for water and one for food. She filled both of these and put them in the back yard right next to the porch. Prince ate the food in the bowl and then ambled over to the farthest corner of the yard and hunched himself over and pooped.
“Well I guess we had to have some of that action,” Ellen said, and cleaned up the mess with a plastic bag and threw it in the garbage can in the alley. It wasn’t such a big deal and you could see how people got used to doing it.
When Sheila got home, Ellen was sitting out on the back steps and Prince was resting on an old rug that Ellen had brought out for him. Ellen was wearing her winter coat, because it was getting cold and the wind had picked up. “What’s this?” Sheila said. “Have you lost what’s left of your mind?” She stayed in the house and didn’t open the door all the way.
“He’s a nice old dog,” Ellen said. “His name is Prince.”
“Oh is it. And what’s that you’re doing, exactly?”
Ellen had the small loom Sheila had bought her for making pot holders and was busy braiding yarn through it. “I’m making Prince a collar.”
Sheila closed the door and went back in the house. A little while later she opened it again. “Come inside so we can talk. Your friend stays out there.”
She waited while Ellen got up and dusted herself off and carried the loom in front of her so the yarn wouldn’t come loose. Sheila said, “Have you considered that this dog is probably lost, that he has a family who misses him, and who’s heartbroken with worry over him?”
“Families aren’t always like that.”
“Have you even thought about looking in the lost and found?” Sheila folded her arms and waited. When she already knew the answer to a thing, there was a space right between her eyebrows that gleamed with happiness. Ellen shook her head, no. “Well I’m going to do that right this minute. What if he has fleas? Do you want to start scratching fleas? Ellen! You have no idea where this dog came from, or if he’s dangerous, or if he has some kind of dog disease.”
“I’ll take him to the vet,” Ellen said. “I’ll do all those things you’re supposed to do.”
“Vets are expensive.”
“I’ll use my Social Security money.”
Ellen’s Social Security money went into a bank account and stayed there, except for what Sheila called “household expenses.” It was another one of those things that Sheila had put herself in charge of. Ellen kept her head down. She could feel Sheila looking at her, the beam coming out from that place between her eyes.
“We’ll talk about that later,” Sheila said. “Meanwhile, I want it understood, I will not have a stray dog in my house.”
“It’s my house really,” Ellen said, but only after Sheila had left the kitchen.
When it was time for bed, Ellen cooked a hamburger for Prince and gave him some extra dog c
ookies. She put an old blanket on top of the rug so he’d have a warmer bed. “I’m sorry you have to stay outside,” she told him. “It’s because of Sheila. She’s just that way.” Prince licked her hand and settled down in his bed. It was like he understood about Sheila, and he’d make the best of it.
In the middle of the night, Ellen woke up to hear the wind smacking against the windows, and rain coming down hard. Prince! She jumped out of bed, ran downstairs, and opened the back door. “Prince!” she called, but he wasn’t there. Rain poured through the downspout and pooled around the bed she’d made for him. “Prince! Where are you?” The air was black with cold rain. Her head and feet were already soaked. She started crying.
Then a dark shape came out from beneath the bushes along the alley fence. “Prince! Here boy!”
She held the door open for him and he trotted in, shaking himself. Water flew everywhere. Ellen knelt down and hugged him so that they were both wet. “I’m sorry sorry sorry,” she told him. “Are you all right? Oh, Prince.”
“Ellen?” Sheila was calling her from the top of the stairs. “You don’t have that dog in here, do you?”
“If you make him go outside, I’m going with him,” Ellen said, and she waited for Sheila to do one thing or the other.
“Basement,” Sheila said. “And make sure he stays there.” Ellen heard her go back down the hall and shut the bedroom door.
“Come on,” Ellen told Prince. “It’ll be okay now.” She flipped on the basement light and took his water bowl and some dog cookies downstairs with them. She used towels from the laundry to dry Prince off. She found an old nightgown of her mother’s and changed into it from her wet pajamas. There were two couches in one corner from her growing-up days, the smelly kind the thrift shop wouldn’t take.
Ellen patted one of them so that Prince knew it was for him, and he jumped right up. Ellen lay down on the other and covered herself with an afghan. The couch had all the same lumps and bumps she remembered from being a little girl. She burrowed into them so they fit better. She reached out and patted the top of Prince’s head, which was still sort of damp.
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