A Three Dog Life

by Abigail Thomas

  I remember a month or two when our mother took it into her head to serve tea when we got home from school. I remember her asking, "Black? Or white?" meaning milk or not. My memory gives this all an ironic twist, as if our mother knew she was playing at tea party, but I think part of her took this seriously. She showed so much care, there was the tray, there was the pot of tea and another of hot water, there were sugar lumps instead of sugar ("One or two?" "Five, please."). I can't visualize the cups and saucers, but the cookies (were there cookies?) were almost certainly those not-cookies, the boring Petit Beurres she favored. Then one day there was no tea as if it had never happened.

  I remember our mother conjugating the Latin verb to love and singing this to the tune of a popular song I've forgotten (amo, amas, amat) and us kids sliding down in our seats when she hollered it out the car window on our way up the hill to the Palisades Post Office. The ancient wisteria that grew by my windows is forever the smell of hot summer, and carries with it the memory of Tony Wallace, who taught me, very gently, how to French kiss. We were on a hill overlooking the Hudson. Should my sister say she loves wisteria, that wisteria is her favorite flower, part of me wants to shout, "It grew outside MY window." But none of it belongs to me.

  My god, Tony was a handsome boy. He had no curfew and a Nash Rambler and I could hear it coming from forty miles way. He invited me out, but at fifteen I was scared and shy, and five minutes before he was due to pick me up I'd beg my mother to tell him I was sick. Finally I went to his house for supper. I can't remember anything except the Ovaltine, which I was afraid to drink for fear the Haitian cook had put a voodoo spell on it. I've got a photograph of me with Tony printed on a matchbook from the Copacabana, where we went one night with his parents. He was seventeen and I was sixteen. My sister kept the matchbook safe for me for forty years. Then she handed it over. My eldest daughter framed it in a silver frame and gave it to me for Christmas as a surprise. In this photo you can see dark shadows under his eyes. My eyes look black—my pupils opening wide in the flash of the camera.

  "How is Rich?" people ask. "Does he remember you?" Yes, he knows me and his daughter, Sally. He knows his granddaughter, Nora. The four of us spend Thursday afternoons together. Sally and the baby come down from Albany and I pick Rich up at the nursing home and drive him to my house in Woodstock. These days he seems to recognize sights along Route 28. Or does he? Maybe it's just his funny bone that's tickled when we pass the sign for Thomas's Pest Control, because he chuckles every time. Sometimes he remarks, "Here we are," when the church comes up on our left and we make the turn. "Hello, Shorty," he says to Harry, our old dog.

  I don't know what happened to all Rich's memories. One of his favorites was the cool birch woods in Finland, where he once ran a race, a place he used to conjure up whenever he felt in a tight spot. He is very hard of hearing now, and that much conversation would be almost impossible. "Do you remember the woods in Finland?" I would have to shout, and then watch him struggle to hear, and then to make sense of what I said. Sometimes that is too sad. Besides, there is enough going on. "Do you want to use the bathroom?" Sally suggested to her father last week. He shook his head and asked, "Why? Do you have a dire need for fresh urine?" We laughed, and I wrote it down so I don't forget.

  After lunch Rich always takes his old place by the sink and begins to wash the dishes. No part of him has forgotten the slow circling of the sponge on the face of the plate, or the careful rinsing of glasses or cleaning between the tines of a fork. When Sally and the baby leave to go home, Rich and I hold hands and wave good-bye from the porch. Later he will put on his reading glasses and take up the paper. The dogs will deposit themselves near our feet. The afternoon will slide into evening, and before it gets dark I will take him back to the place where he lives, but not yet. For now, he will look at the paper and I will look at him, and let what's over and done with disappear into the here and now.

  IV

  Filling What's Empty

  An old refrigerator came with the house. It contained a half bottle of ketchup, a squeeze container of ballpark mustard, and an open jar of pickle relish. I appreciate how hard it is to throw such things away, and harder still to pack them up and move them with you, but other people's condiments are depressing. On top of that, unidentified odors leaked into the freezer; if you pulled out a vegetable drawer a shelf collapsed; and the outside was made of some wrinkled Naugahyde-like material you can't clean. (I don't know who invented this stuff, but it was surely not the hand that holds the sponge.) Anyway, I just never warmed up to this appliance, and I blamed it for the fact that except for Thanksgiving I never bought food. So two years later, armed with statistics from Consumer Reports, I marched off to Sears and three days after that, a brand-new, spanking clean appliance arrived in my kitchen.

  This new baby gleams. The stainless steel exterior cost extra and it came with a bottle of special cleaner and instructions in three languages. The vegetable drawers have choices for degrees of crispness. The door can hold two half-gallon containers of milk side by side, the freezer is spacious and smells only of cold. There is even a separate shelf for eggs. The first week I bought yogurt and cottage cheese and apples and chicken and lettuce and cream. I had milk and orange juice and seltzer, and for my visiting daughter and her friends, beer. I even put water in the ice cube trays. I invited friends for supper and made my mother's famous potatoes—Gruyère cheese, heavy cream, red-hot pepper flakes, salt and pepper, nutmeg. And oh yes, potatoes. I made hot fudge sauce and stocked up on four pints of vanilla ice cream. And then a week went by and another and now the icebox is empty again. You won't find the makings of a ham and cheese sandwich, or even peanut butter and jelly. There's precious little in the way of greenery although a head of iceberg lettuce has stayed unnaturally crisp for several weeks in the vegetable drawer. I try to make up grocery lists but never get very far. I do always have coffee and dog food (I love to buy dog food) and usually there's a pound of butter in the freezer. But I can't blame my poor shopping habits on the refrigerator anymore, this new one is begging to be filled.

  Maybe it's because I'm a WASP. This reminds me of the cookbook I started to write years ago. It was to be a WASP cookbook and I was going to call it The Goy of Cooking. In a preface I never finished I noted that WASPs are not bad cooks, and we have lots of great recipes (think popovers, think standing rib roast, think fudge). Our problem lies in the fact that we never buy food. I abandoned the project, and never got to the bottom of this failing. (A friend offered me Marianne Moore's recipe for custard. I thanked her and said I had a recipe for custard already. "Oh but this is very WASPy," she went on. "It's custard for one.") On the other hand, when my kids were small my refrigerator was far from empty. I remember a lot of yogurt, cream cheese, jelly, peanut butter, American cheese slices, cheddar cheese, Roquefort, leftover apple pie (if there were leftovers), leftover brisket, apples, orange juice, butter, milk. Lettuce and tomatoes and onions and potatoes. For a while my freezer contained a bottle of vodka with a wisp of buffalo grass inside, and for a few bad years I took swigs of this syrupy concoction all day long.

  ***

  Still, the WASP theory dies hard. I have only to remember taking my old friend Jerry to my mother's house in East Hampton. I heard a cry from the kitchen and went to see what was wrong. He was standing in front of the open refrigerator, pointing to its contents—a bottle of champagne and a jar of bitter marmalade, both sitting on doilies. And then there's the memory of my mother's frantic cry when any of us children headed toward the kitchen. "Don't eat anything!" In her later years as a great grandmother she plied us all with baked Brie and pâté and cookies. She broke off big pieces of chocolate bar beseeching us to eat. In the old days perhaps she had bought only enough food to last through supper. Maybe what we were eating were the ingredients of the evening meal. She was a good cook but sometimes meat was on the chewy side. On these occasions she glared at us as we valiantly gnawed our way through strips of beef. "Good tough meat," she wou
ld say in a challenging tone.

  At the same time my refrigerator arrived I collapsed the dining room table and lined the walls with bookcases. I don't have a dining room sort of life—we eat on our laps in the kitchen if I have company—and this was a room I passed through to get somewhere else. It was useless, really, except for Thanksgiving. And now we're headed into fall, my favorite season, and there are empty bookcases all around me, and boxes of books in New York City waiting to be moved up here. I sit in this new room, trying it on for size, and discover that my house doesn't fit me anymore. Maybe it's because from here I can see into the empty kitchen, and then turn my head and look into the empty living room. On either side are these uninhabited rooms, quiet, waiting, but only for me, and I can't sit everywhere at once.

  It occurs to me that eating is a social occasion. Living alone I don't have the energy for shopping, for cooking meals. The dogs and I do fine with me eating standing up and dropping bits of my makeshift supper—often this is buttered toast—into their mouths. But Rich comes on Thursdays, and Sally with Nora, and we have lunch together. Rich lost his sense of smell with the accident, and with it much of his ability to taste. Of all the catastrophic losses he suffered this one seemed gratuitous, and just plain mean. We'd had our favorite meals—baby flounder fried in butter and oil, which we ate with new potatoes and peas; home fries on a rainy afternoon. All this past winter I roasted chickens for Thursdays, or made omelets, but summer has been hot, and nowadays it's mostly deli takeout. Rich still loves to eat, but I don't know what he tastes.

  This Thursday he was anxious. A new doctor had taken him off two of his medications—why do they mess with what works?—and when I went to pick him up he was agitated and miserable, he couldn't come with me, he had plans, there were things he had to do. I wondered if he thought he was back at work. For a couple of years after his accident, he would get desperate, believing he was supposed to be covering a news story he couldn't remember. "We can do everything in Woodstock," I said, but no, no, he had to stay, if he left now nothing would get done and he couldn't put it off any longer. He was sitting on the chair in his little room; a copy of the new American Heritage Dictionary I'd given him was on the bed. "Let's go," I said. "Sally is waiting with the baby," but to no effect. He stood up and felt in his pockets. "I'm looking for something and I don't know what it is. I won't even know it when I find it," he said.

  How did I convince him to leave with me? A mix of cajoling and bullying. We got to the house, where Sally and Nora were waiting, and he was happy to see them as he always is. We ate our big sandwiches and Rich had a couple of chocolate chip cookies, his favorite, but he didn't want coffee, which was just as well since there was no milk.

  "I've got to go," he said, getting up. "It's late." Sally and I looked at each other. We were only an hour into a lovely afternoon. Nora was eating Cheerios in her playpen, the dogs were sleeping in the sun, but Rich was headed for the door, determined to leave. All business.

  There was a new notebook on the counter. I'd bought it because of the color—a wonderful red, and for the green planets on its cover. I handed this to Rich, found a pen, and coaxed him back to the chair. "Here," I said, "you can get organized. Write all the things you need to do." He sat back down and leaning the notebook against his knee he began immediately to write. He looked like a reporter again. Was he thinking about camera crews and soundmen? Was he laying out procedures? The longer he wrote the more curious I got and finally I stood behind the chair and looked over his shoulder.

  "Corn for corn soup. Lettuce, cucumber for salad, along with tomatoes and some cheddar cheese. Kaliber and orange juice. Milk too. Apple juice too. Thicken sliced sandwich bread. Tuna fish, sardines, onions, ham, sardines. Crackers for the cheese."

  NO

  i

  Here is how I get my husband in the car: I lie. "I'm going to buy us something for dinner. Will you come with me?"

  This rainy October afternoon I stick a fake log in the fireplace and light it and we spend what Rich used to call the shank of the day in each other's company, dozing and waking to firelight. It is like being married again. But he can't stay. Sooner or later I have to get up from my chair and disturb him. I have to touch his arm, speak in his ear, jostle him. I have to coax him out of his warm chair and into the car so I can drive him back. "I'm going to get us something for dinner. Will you come with me?" This is what I hate: that he nods so willingly and gets to his feet. That it works every time.

  The dogs allow themselves to be corralled in the living room and Rich and I go slowly down the back steps, my arm under his left arm, his right hand on the banister. I am carrying a box of cookies and once he has gotten into the passenger seat and I've stretched the seat belt and he has buckled it, I give them over. "Chocolate chippers! I might have to have one," he says, opening the box. We are headed back to the Northeast Center for Special Care. I am trying not to feel anything. Now that we are on our way, I want to get it over with. I want to get him there and safely up to his room, then I want to leave as fast as I can. "Are we going to two markets?" Rich asks and I nod. But we drive past the Black Bear Deli and the Hurley Ridge Market without him noticing. We drive down Route 28, we pass the K&R Car Wash, and the single-story pink building that houses Catskill Mountain Organic Coffee, which roasts its own beans, we pass Thomas's Pest Control (Got Mice? Not Nice!) and take the turn for Route 209 North, and I hold my breath waiting to see if this time he will latch on to the fact that I am betraying him. Out of the corner of my eye I can see his hands around the container of cookies on his lap. I am trying not to feel anything.

  "It's been a lovely three days," says Rich, and I know he thinks we're on vacation. "What are our plans?" he asks. "Are we looking for a motel?" He is happy. I remember vacations. We were good companions. I remember the island of Nevis, where little birds ate sugar out of the bowls on our breakfast table. Rich took long runs down the beach and I read Howards End, inexplicably bursting into tears at the end. We had lobster salad sandwiches and fell in love with pelicans and wondered what living there all the time would be like.

  When we get to the nursing home Rich wants to leave the cookies in the car.

  "How will they know these are ours?" he asks. " They will think we are stealing."

  "I will tell them as soon as we go in," I say, and grab the box over his protests and hold his arm, steering us through the parking lot. I smile at the man who opens the sliding glass doors, and Rich's electronic bracelet sets off the alarm briefly. "Hello, Mr. Rogin," he says. "Did you have a nice day?" but Rich is hard of hearing. We make our way to the elevator.

  "What button should I push?" he asks.

  "Two," I say.

  How do I live with myself?

  Some of the residents are in the big dining room watching a movie with Goldie Hawn, but I bring Rich to his room, where I tell myself he will be comfortable. His single bed is neatly made, some of his clothes are folded on top—underwear, two sweatshirts. I gesture toward the chair. "Why don't you sit down for a minute," I suggest. "I will be back soon. I'm going to run a couple of errands." I try not to register his bewildered expression. "I will be back soon."

  I notice the plants need watering but I'll do it next time.

  "But what do we want?" my husband asks. He is distressed, and I realize that I am in his room at the nursing home with one foot out the door, but he is in the supermarket.

  "Milk," I say.

  "Just milk?" He seems dubious.

  "Just milk."

  "How much milk?"

  "Half a gallon," I say, pushing the box of cookies into his hands. I know in five minutes he'll forget I was there at all. I kiss him. Then I'm gone.

  Once I stood in line behind a young woman ordering coffee who remarked to her friend that she didn't yet have a set of beliefs, and I imagined catalogs from which one could order such sets, like furniture, beliefs that wouldn't collapse under one's full weight, big sturdy reliable sideboards of belief. As for me, I have learned wha
t I can do and what I can't. I know my limits. That's all I have to go on, but it's better than nothing.

  ii

  It's a rainy night in 1987 and I'm coming out of the West Side Market with a pint of heavy cream and two boxes of strawberries. My fourteen-year-old daughter and I have been eating strawberry shortcake for almost two weeks now. "It's fruit," I tell myself, "vitamin C," as I maniacally roll out the biscuit dough night after night. Anyway, this particular night there is Crystal, only I don't know her yet. I notice a tall woman wearing an army jacket several sizes too big. She isn't saying anything; you really don't need to if you're standing on the sidewalk with a bunch of kids and a big pregnant belly and you're holding your right hand out, palm up. A little boy stands behind her, his face buried in her jacket. I think of my grandsons and I'm having one of those shocks you get, here is someone I'm meant to know, and I scrounge around in my pockets and ask if there's anything else she needs. "I don't have much money but I've got lots of stuff," I say. "Do you need anything else?" She smiles. She has a beautiful calm face. "Thank you," she says in a soft voice, and she shows her kids the twenty I have just thrust in her palm.

  "Plates," she says, turning back to me. "We have a place to live but we don't have plates."

  Well, I've got plates and I go home and pack some up in a box along with forks and spoons and knives and some extra mugs. I add a huge jar of honey and carry the box back to where they are still standing. I insist on giving her cab fare and she and the kids pile into the car and go home with booty. For the next month I run into Crystal maybe once a week, usually outside the market, and for some reason, we really hit it off. Sometimes we go have coffee at Happy Burger and talk about music or fled youth; we compare women with children to women without and agree they don't speak our language. Then she gives birth and I don't see her for a while. A few months later she is outside the West Side Market with Jeremiah and Goldie, and we all have lunch together in Happy Burger, and I try not to notice that both kids smell of urine, and that this four-year-old boy has never learned to talk. Crystal and I sit with our elbows on the table and we talk about childbirth and laugh about men. I love her resilience, her optimism, her sense of humor. The hardest part about asking for money, she says, is that it is embarrassing. I want to know what she has learned about human nature. "People don't stop when it's raining," she says, with a laugh. One night we go see Predator together, both of us love Arnold, and after the cab drops her off the driver asks, "Is she your maid?" and I say, "No," righteously, "she is my friend."