A Three Dog Life

by Abigail Thomas

  Last week he didn't smile or greet me. He wouldn't hold my hand. "What's wrong?" I asked, this was so unlike him. "We're divorced," he said, as if I were an imbecile. "We're married, Rich," I told him. "We've been married fourteen years. You're my husband," I said, touching his arm, "I'm your wife." He looked at me coldly. "Transparent windowlike words." He doesn't believe in his brain injury, so he has come up with an explanation for my absence: I have left him. "I'm alone," he says, waving his arm down the hall. "Hundreds of single beds," he says, "hundreds of single beds with old men lying in them with their boots on."

  Time has gotten skewed, as tangled as fish line, what means what anymore? How could it be two years since the accident? I calculate it in months, weeks, but the numbers don't feel real or important. One hundred and four weeks. Twenty-four months. Whole handfuls of time have slipped through my fingers. Seasons rush by before I have grasped "winter," "spring." Somehow I have gotten to be sixty, in no time Rich will be seventy. We would have had parties to mark the place, but the last birthday slid by unnoticed, the last anniversary. Twenty-four months since the accident. If it were a child, it would be talking, walking, climbing into everything. "Time flaps on its mast," wrote Virginia Woolf in Mrs. Dalloway. For us time hangs off its mast. Sometimes I'm not even sure about the mast. Something stopped ticking April 24, 2000. Our years together ended, our future together changed. In one moment of startling clarity he told me, "My future has been dismantled." Last week he wouldn't look at me for an hour. "If I may navigate this already swollen stream of self-absorption," he said at last, "people borrow things without asking."

  " What things?" I asked gratefully, and with that the subject had changed. We spent the rest of the afternoon looking at The Sibley Guide to Birds, which I'd bought him a year ago. We spent a long time with ducks, with woodpeckers and thrushes. He didn't recall having ever seen a Magnificent Frigate Bird and I didn't insist. Long-term memory is sometimes intact, but he'd forgotten that long-gone windy day on Long Island.

  My friend Ruth, a bereavement counselor, tells me that most widows remember more vividly the last weeks of their husband's lives than the span of their lives together. I am not a widow, but my husband as he was is gone. I concentrate on who Rich is at any given moment and I lose sight of who he was, who we were. It takes my friend Denise to recall how when we had company at our house in Greenport, Rich went out early in the morning to buy several newspapers, bags of warm scones and croissants and muffins. I had forgotten, and remembering was painful. Rich used to make a mean omelet. On nights when I was cooked out and there was nothing much to eat, Rich fixed an omelet for himself. Did I want one, he always asked, and no thanks, I always said. But the look of it sliding out of the pan, perfect with that mottled brown, smelling of butter, sometimes a little lox thrown in at the last minute, weakened my resolve, and Rich would slide the better part of half onto a plate and urge me to eat. I remember how he used to wake me in Greenport with a cup of cappuccino from Aldo's. One weekend when our friends Sarah and Cornelius and Kathy were visiting we looked up the Magnificent Frigate Bird in the Audubon book and discovered that the male has a red pouch that he inflates to make himself attractive to the female, but it takes him thirty minutes to get it done. "Phoo phoo—be there in a minute, honey—phoo phoo!" We laughed ourselves sick at the kitchen table. How long ago was that? The only way to contain catastrophe is to cordon it off with dates, but the numbers mean nothing. If I think instead of how much dust would have settled on Rich's bureau, then I can feel it. There is nothing like dust.

  When Rich is ready, we obtain the pass that lets us out of this locked ward and downstairs to the cafeteria. This week his mood is better, and we look forward to lunch. Rich takes the tray and passes all the baskets of condiments along the right wall. He examines carefully everything in every basket, then drops two onto the tray. Slippery packets of mayonnaise, ketchup, jelly, something unspeakably awful called "table syrup," tartar sauce, margarine, salad dressing. Soon the tray is crowded with these silvery foil-wrapped items. Napkins, two knives, two forks, two spoons. Lots and lots of saltines. I meanwhile am slapping together an egg salad sandwich for him, bowls of salad, a few bananas. We meet at the cash register. "I don't have any money," says Rich anxiously, but I tell him it's on me. (My cheese sandwich after weighing comes to thirty-two cents.) We find a table and unload the food. Last week, the week we were divorced, he looked around and said, "All these people dunking their doughnuts in a cup of sorrow, I hope it's not contaminated by the River Styx." Today we are holding hands again, happy to be together. We eat, go back for more coffee, unwrap the saltines. When the food is gone Rich starts in on the condiments, carefully opening each one, inspecting it, and scooping or squeezing out the contents and eating them on saltines. He is like a curious, determined child.

  I want to be upstairs at 1:30, the designated smoking time. In the lunchroom for the Behavioral Unit, cigarettes are rationed out after mealtime, and heavy steel ashtrays gotten from the cupboard. The techs hand out the cigs and light the smokes for those who smoke, most everyone does. God knows I do. One of the patients, Mr. Mendez, has a beautiful voice and, having been asked, is now singing "The Star-Spangled Banner" in Spanish. He clasps his hands on the table, his feet tapping in time, and before each phrase he draws solemn breath from his diaphragm without compromising the pace of the anthem. He sings for fifteen minutes without coming to the end, somewhere his needle is stuck, and soon I don't know where or how the song does end. At last he finishes, or rather, stops singing. We applaud and Mr. Mendez is modest but not humble. When the clapping subsides he looks around smiling and says, "This is America." He bows.

  I went to Mexico for a week last winter, a place on the Yucatán Peninsula where time stops, or at least the importance of telling time. You get up at dawn, eat when you're hungry, go to bed when it's dark. The rest of the time you lie in the sun, float in the water. There were pelicans smashing into the water in their ungainly fashion; one afternoon five impossibly pink flamingos flew by, everyone suddenly got to their feet, shielding their eyes against the sun, like a stadium full of people rising to watch a grand slam. Later I saw two other birds, and I knew what they were right away although I had never seen one before. By the time I got out my camera they had imbedded themselves higher and higher in the blue sky until they were specks. I snapped a picture but you'd never know. They could have been anything up there.

  III

  Learning to Live Alone

  I'd had my new car three days when I backed into a tree, smashing the rear window and denting the frame. The tree (ghostly in the fog) was in a hardware store parking lot, and in the car were two new garbage cans. I drove home in shock, little bits of glass tinkling in the back and no doubt dropping on the highway behind me. I pulled into the driveway of the house I'd just bought, pressed my head against the steering wheel, and waited. What was I waiting for? I was waiting for a big man to show up and fix everything. Did I mention it was raining? That the odometer had 311 miles on it?

  When nobody appeared I went inside and called my children. My daughter Jennifer, perhaps speaking for them all, said kindly, "Mom, you really have to learn to drive." There seemed no point in insisting that I did know how to drive. She suggested I call the car dealer. I did. The car dealer said, "Ouch," and suggested the auto glass company. The auto glass company suggested the bodywork man, the bodywork man said call the insurance company, which I had not yet thought to do. The insurance lady said, "Oh, let's not tell them about this. They will drop you like a hot potato." They hadn't wanted me in the first place, she assured me, a sixty-one-year-old woman who had never had car insurance, who had driven a total of zero miles in the past three years, and lived in New York City.

  In the old days my husband, Rich, took care of the car. He got it inspected, changed its oil, even had the tires rotated. Had he been here I could have wailed to him about the foggy evening and the nearly invisible tree, he would have let me go upstairs and get under the covers w
hile he took care of everything. But he wasn't here. There was just the bald fact: I had backed my car into a tree. Nothing else was relevant, the weather, the humble purchases, the small parking lot, nothing. I had backed my car into a tree, and accepting this seemed to require less energy. It turned out to be easy to open the Yellow Pages and to my delight I discovered myself capable of making the phone calls to arrange the repairs and a couple of weeks later I had my car back, almost as good as new. This small accomplishment was thrilling. Perhaps I was at last becoming an adult.

  The word capable has always conjured up a long reach and muscled calves, perhaps a hearty laugh to go along with it—capable knew what to do with a jack, could change a fuse, rewire a lamp, but it didn't have a feminine or sexy ring to it. In the face of mechanical crises—flat tires, no hot water—I always went belly-up. Why? Because I could get away with it. Not that it's any great shakes, but I don't need a fainting couch anymore every time the house makes a terrible sound or the radiators go stone cold. If the furnace has gone off again, I flick the cellar light on, march resolutely down the stairs, stride over to my Buck Rogers spaceship of a furnace, turn a valve, and keep my eye on a glass tube that needs to fill, but not too much. Too much will result in water cascading through the ceilings. I have to do this or my pipes will burst. If I took to my bed, I might wake up in the soggy ruin of my house.

  It has been almost three years since Rich's accident. I bought this house, which is only twenty minutes from where he lives. As sometimes happens with traumatic brain injury, Rich has slipped into premature dementia. I don't know what he remembers of our old life, the places we lived, the conversations we had, the routines. It's hard for me to remember what we were like before the accident, the years since have been harrowing, Rich in and out of psychosis, terrible paranoias, rages, the kinds of things brain injury sets in motion. He is calm now, he has settled comfortably into his skin, often he is merry, the rages flown, the terrors abated. Our conversations don't always make sense but they are wonderful. "You squeezed all those colors from fruit," Rich observed the other day. I was knitting a scarf out of red and purple wool. "Yes, I did," I agreed. He speaks sometimes of the "knitting lady" and the "other Abby," and if I tell him there's only one Abby and I am here right now, "Yes," he will say, then add gently, "but there's the other Abby too." And what do I know? Maybe I do have some shadowy doppelgänger in a corner of the room, or down the hall.

  Doppelgängers, ghosts, my mind has always been open, which is part of the problem. Starting with the gorilla I was convinced lurked in the streets of Saint Paul when I was eleven (despite the twenty-foot snowdrifts), I've had irrational fears all my life. Back in Minnesota my father had to stand on our back porch and Mrs. Rice on her back porch, while I made the dash home after an evening of Monopoly with my friend Karen, shouting all the way. One summer Rich and I rented a small cabin in the woods of Maine—"as far from anyone else as we can get, I don't want to see another house" was my absurd criterion. It was terrible. There wasn't another living soul. When the old gent who rented us the place told us reassuringly that in thirty years there had only been one break-in "but all they took was the ax," I wanted to leave immediately. We stayed. Every night I stared at the ceiling and waited for the footfall that would herald our bloody execution. It didn't help that there were millions of daddy longlegs all over the living room and the walls were decorated with farm tools of the kind you don't want to have an accident with. It didn't help that the book I had naively brought was The Silence of the Lambs. Rich wasn't scared. He tried to be helpful, but he just wasn't scared. We left a day early anyway, Rich gamely driving through the worst rainstorm in the history of the world just to get me back to good old, safe old New York City. From then on I was not a candidate for a freestanding house in the country. People next to me and over me and under me, that was the natural way to live. Millions of people everywhere.

  Yet here I am. Nowadays if I see the attic light on when I'm outside at night with my dogs, I simply do not look up again. This doesn't even require willpower. I have a choice: go crazy with the fear or get a grip. The image of a small creature hunched up in what I imagined to be a crawl space, eating peanut butter sandwiches and dropping the crusts might give me a turn, but I am able to put it out of my head. The next morning I find which switch controls the attic light (something I hadn't known) and turn it off. I also make it my business to go with a friend into the attic for the first time. We pull down the stairs, walk around, and I see it isn't a crawl space and there are no gargoyles, and realize it is better to see the attic than to not see the attic. There have been lots of other odd noises. First there were the wind chimes that went off with no wind, a whole bunch of them on the screened porch. I was loath to take them down lest I continue to hear them, but my youngest daughter, annoyed to tears by their incessant tinkling, cut them down willy-nilly and we haven't been troubled since. Then there was the banging that woke me and the dogs one night at one in the morning. I leapt from bed, stomped downstairs flicking on every light and yelling my head off for whoever it was to get out of my house. The hammering continued and the dogs and I were determined to track it down. Scared as I was, and I was scared, I was delighted to find that anger overrode my fear. I was not going to cower in my bedroom or hide in my closet. I was going to beard the lion in its den. And, anyway, it was my den. Whenever we got close, the noise stopped, then started up again somewhere else. "This is my house," I shouted down the cellar stairs at one point (the only time my dogs were really scared). Eventually we lay down on the couch, every light in the house blazing, and waited it out. Later my friend Chuck suggested he get me a chain saw as a housewarming present. I could keep it under my pillow. The sight of me in my big flannel nightie carrying a chain saw would surely scare the bejesus out of anything. For the record, I never found out what made the hammering but happily it hasn't come back.

  I'm comfortable here. The sound of something smacking its lips over by the fireplace? I don't even look up from my knitting. A kind of slithery sound like something being (gasp) dragged? A sound that morphs into heavy breathing (through a very large nose) that comes, upon investigation, from the walls of every single room in the house? No problem. If I don't hear toe-nails scrabbling, and I don't, the dogs and I go to bed. The noises are real and no doubt have a logical explanation, but at midnight logic is not my companion, so the solution is to keep my imagination in check. A warm body on either side of me under the covers is excellent company and I find a big smile on my face, thinking that we are coexisting with walls that snuffle and grunt. In the old days I'd've been out of the house in a microsecond, but had I left, I might never have been able to come back.

  I know what I'm doing here. I love the house, the village, the people I've met are already dear to me. And Rich is only twenty minutes away. Today he is unshaven, walking slowly into the lunchroom when I arrive. He is wearing wrinkled khaki trousers and an unfamiliar flannel shirt that his daughter, Sally, must have brought him. He looks at me with surprise and happiness. "Absie!" he says. His hands are cold. He is sweetness itself. His hug still warms me like nothing else. We go downstairs to the art room, passing the huge goldfish tank. Usually he comments on how fat the goldfish are, but today he stops. "I wonder if they know where they are," he says. "Or if they remember other aquariums."

  In the middle of the night I think of his smiling face, and the goblins disperse. Or if they don't, I can stare them down.

  How to Break Up a Dogfight

  Grab the haunches of the smaller dog and pull. Or grab the haunches of the larger dog and pull. Forget about being bitten. Or consider what your friend Claudette did in this situation and recall her words for their comic relief. "I screamed and threw a paper towel at them."

  Carry a water pistol at all times filled with some repellent liquid. Try to remember the name of the harmless substance all dogs hate. Toy with the idea of ammonia, lemon juice. Tear gas. Wear an earsplitting whistle around your neck. Have handy a coffee can f
illed with coins to shake at them. Shock yourself by declaring after a fight in which your hound, Carolina, bit her own tongue and sent streams of blood flying at your skirt, "I feel just like Jackie Kennedy." Ponder your sudden ability to joke about the event that for forty years had you weeping every time you thought of it. Try to figure out why this is no longer sacred ground. Realize that September 11 changed everything.

  Hire a dog trainer and then be unavailable for the next three months through no fault of your own. Make sure that for the initial visit you have hurt your back and can't move anything except your eyes and mouth without screaming. After he leaves remember everything you did badly as a mother and begin to get depressed. Have a falling-out with a beloved daughter and get so depressed you can't see straight. Call your psychiatrist after a year and discover she is out of town for the next three weeks. Listen to your friend who suggests you think about whether dogfights and family fights have any similarities and if you can apply what you have learned about one to the other. Realize that you know nothing about either and can do nothing about anything. The next time the dogs start growling and circling each other, fling open the kitchen door and stomp down the steps shouting, "If you don't stop that this minute I am leaving forever and never coming back!" Face the fact that this is probably not the first time these words escaped your lips. Think about your children's childhoods and fall further into a slough of despond.