New Life, No Instructions

by Gail Caldwell

  My sister was a tomboy, the movable object that whirled around me. Adoring and ever complicit, I was her willing sidekick, partly because she had access to the locomotive of life that I limped along behind.

  “What do you remember about the polio?” I asked her recently.

  “Nothing,” she said, no hesitation in her voice. Then, after a pause: “It was just always there, like the air.”

  That in itself gives it a more vivid place in consciousness than I retain: Like a well patient viewing the one in the hospital bed, Pam saw a different reality from the one I perceived. If I recognized the force field of my own constraints, I remember just as clearly the things I mastered: I learned to swim when I was about four, and loved it so thoroughly that I had to be extracted from the pool. You could swim outside in the Panhandle from April to October, and four or five days a week in summer my mother drove us to the Western Riviera swim club, a place of ease and chlorine and sun-baked perfection. When Pam and I went diving for pennies, I held my breath for so long that I repeatedly alarmed the lifeguards.

  For years I fantasized about being a mermaid: my imaginary, Olympian life of easy movement. And I remember synchronized swimming with a delirious, out-of-time pleasure that my body still responds to: flip, arms spread, feet kicking, the other girls in perfect (or so it seemed) harmony around me. The lights were on in the pool: Was this a nighttime performance, little girls giving their dance recital in the water? It was the era of Esther Williams, the Hollywood swimmer with the chin-strap cap and dazzling smile, mugging for the camera while petals of swimmers unfolded around her with military grace. So my recollection of this event is probably mixed up with my imagined want of it. But I know it was the one activity I could do that my sister could not, and that the water itself—sweet and infinite shelter—was a place where all legs were created equal, where balance wasn’t mandatory and no cruel ground or gravity reached up to stop me. Impossible to fall down in the water.

  My dad used to say that bluff can carry you a long way. Here are the things I could not do as a kid: ride a bike, jump rope, run track, play softball or basketball. Here’s the more important thing: I’m not sure how much I cared. I do remember feeling relief when my parents decided I didn’t have to try anymore to keep a two-wheeler upright. But as that door closed, other corridors revealed themselves. I read after bedtime in the closet with a flashlight. I learned fractions from my dad by looking over his shoulder at his beloved stock pages in the newspaper. He took me quail- and dove-hunting in the empty wilds outside of Amarillo, and taught me to fish off the long pier at Port Aransas, on the Texas Gulf. There is even a picture of me, age four, on a horse one summer in Colorado—though the other three members of my mounted family are grinning, and I am clutching the saddle horn on my enormous old horse, stricken, looking as though I’ve been grabbed by King Kong.

  Most of my bad memories about polio and its effects involve the orthopedic surgeon we saw, a cold, unfriendly man with a mustache whom I must have demonized. He poked and prodded; he declared me lazy when I didn’t walk by age two. At some point he put me in heavy orthopedic shoes, horrid tie-up oxfords, which I wore to school and then promptly stashed in my locker, exchanging them for a pair of girlish flats I had hidden there. The last time I remember seeing him, when I was eight or nine, he used a reflex hammer too roughly on my knee to test my response, and when my leg popped up, I intentionally kicked him in the chin.

  This was atypical. I was a mild-mannered girl until adolescence, but I was already stubborn, and I had clearly had enough of this doctor. I don’t mean to downplay the psychological effects of polio or succumb to the tough persona that, for better and worse, I cultivated through a lot of life. The truth is that I felt a terrible impotence when my leg failed me, when it was put to the test in athletics, and I struggled mightily to create as many other paths as possible. And I set out to avoid failure at almost any cost.

  I hit adolescence in the early 1960s, pre–Title IX, when girls’ athletics were neglected and even perceived as uncool, and somehow my resilience and my body type gave me a way out. I shot up four inches in a year, and so became a gangly girl who walked a bit crookedly. When my friends ran for cheerleader, I ran for student council; while they were doing pyramids and flips on the football field, I buried myself in algebra and edited the high school annual. We went on a class skiing trip to Ruidoso, New Mexico, and when I promptly fell down on the bunny slope, the boys started calling me “Grace,” a friendly, half-flattering nickname that stuck through adolescence.

  As with most blueprints of a life, my internal circumstances conspired with history to create an imperfect and complex essence: ungainly but leggy, unathletic but class clown, smart but rebellious. I spent a lot of time mouthing off in class or smoking in the parking lot. The rebellion was typical; the degree of it was not. I was like a half-lame horse trying to get out of the gate: frustrated and anxious and mad with desire. I turned some of that initial impotence into fury and determination, despair doing a head race with blind will.

  And somewhere, always, is my mother, the valiant coach on the floor beside me. The woman who, well into her seventies, went with me to the town swimming pool whenever I visited Amarillo. She took a seat on the bleachers and watched me swim laps for a half hour or longer, which I had begun doing in my twenties and have done ever since. In keeping with the general sparseness of the Panhandle, I was usually the only one in the pool. She was the sole spectator, no book or magazine to distract her, and when I emerged from a flip turn and looked her way, she would smile and wave. As though there were nothing more fascinating than watching a grown daughter slice through the water, stroke after stroke, for laps on end, in a quiet pool. My intrepid, tinder-dry mother. Years after her death, it is one of my favorite memories of her.

  3.

  Both my parents had grown up on farms in East Texas, and had an easy way with animals. Every Easter we got take-out chicks and ducklings—a commonplace practice in Texas in the fifties. A week or two before the holiday, pastel chicks would appear in the garden centers, their feathers dyed green and pink and purple. My mom and dad preferred the natural variety; we usually brought home two or three hatchlings that quacked and chirped around our sunny backyard.

  One year we brought home a pair of ducklings and named them Wadlington and Quack Quack, and my sister, who was four or five, got an early lesson in the perils of unrequited love. I got a lesson that was more subtle and probably formative.

  Pam fell hard for Wadlington, who had already imprinted on my dad and followed him everywhere. Distraught over the duckling’s inattention one day while she was playing, Pam cast Wadlington away from her, and he fell sideways off the back stoop and broke his leg.

  My father was a tough and calm man, more softhearted than he could ever display. First he consoled my sister, who was beside herself with hurt and regret. Then he went about fixing her mistake. He got a Popsicle stick and a roll of gauze, and soon the duck had a splinted leg and a cardboard box to recuperate in. Pam and my dad took care of Wadlington for weeks. After the leg was healed, we drove the duckling to Memory Gardens, a cemetery park in downtown Amarillo, and released him into the pond there, where he glided onto the waters with the other ducks. On land, he would always walk with a limp, but on the surface of the pond, he was fully restored, a duck among ducks. We went back to visit him for years.

  For a long time this story seemed straightforward, a sweet glimpse of my dad. Decades later, a few years after his death, I realized the emotional framework it must have provided me. Despite the physical evidence of what polio had done to me, my father mostly acted as though it had never happened. My entire life, he displayed his fierce loyalty by refusing to believe that there was anything wrong with my leg—or that anything held me back beyond my own failure of will.

  His denial was infuriating until I understood it. He couldn’t bear the notion of my injury. He bought me handsome goatskin cowboy boots and saddle-soaped them every time I returned home
to Texas, until his hands were too arthritic to brush the leather. When he was eighty-five and on a walker, he assumed I was strong enough to catch him if he fell, even though he was twice my size. Of all the doubts I have suffered in my life, even in the chaos of adolescence, his love for me was one of the things I never questioned. If he had no splint to help me navigate the world, he relied instead on straightforward faith. Believing in my strength would make it so.

  I think about the Wadlington story when given the reminder—trying to conquer the icy sidewalks of New England, say, or swimming one more length in a pool or pond, where I am still more stable than on land. My father tried to hide his tenderheartedness with gruffness, but he was also bullheaded to the point of absurdity, determined as the duck he saved that day and the daughter he raised. Whatever I was able to glean from watching Wadlington’s fall and rise, I know it provided two unshakable instructions: that my dad could fix things—that you could take a bad situation and make it better—and that a creature with a fragile leg could make her way, could swim the ponds and have a normal life.

  4.

  Rarely does the attainment of a childhood fantasy possess the purity of the original: Being an astronaut may sound pretty cool until you get to higher math and astrophysics. My most enduring fantasy, though, turned out to be bulletproof. It involved a white dog, who got larger in size as I got older, and its manifestation in adult life was as enriching as the little-girl dream.

  When I was about three, I had a stuffed white dog I carried everywhere. I skipped over dolls entirely and went straight from stuffed animals to books: The Yearling and The Call of the Wild and The Swiss Family Robinson. I pored over the color illustrations of white dogs in the family encyclopedia, from West Highland terriers to Great Pyrenees, until the pages were creased and worn. My grail arrived when I was eleven, in the form of a paperback edition of How to Raise and Train a Samoyed that I still own. I found the book at a pet store and begged my mother to buy it for me. No matter that I had never seen a Samoyed, hot West Texas being no place for a long-haired northern sled dog. However nebulous the future is to a child, I had linked mine to the white dog I envisioned by my side. She was my Rosebud before she even existed.

  Tula was my second Samoyed. She flew home with me in the summer of 2008, nine weeks old and eleven pounds of love and trouble, already charming her way through life when I took her through security at the Baltimore airport. Months earlier I had lost my first Sam, Clementine, who for thirteen years brought such sweetness and freedom to my life that I swore I would never be without a dog again.

  Clementine’s death was the last in a string of losses I had suffered over the previous six years. My closest friend, Caroline, had died in 2002 of lung cancer when she was forty-two. A year later my father died, the great oak tree fallen on the landscape. And my mother, even at ninety-one an edifice of wit and strength, had died in my arms in 2006.

  For the next two years my heart felt like a bombed-out village. Clementine and I patrolled it together, and because she was aged and failing, I lived in a state of anticipatory sorrow, clinging to what I had left with her and knowing what was ahead. After she was gone, I wanted to lie down amid the rubble and stay there.

  We do get up, of course, which seems a wonder. People stumble forth from whole-scale atrocities and personal tragedies and ordinary miseries and find a way to go to the store, talk to God, buy bulbs for the fall planting. And yet I sensed that I had not just been pummeled by death but reshaped by it, poised now at some crucial junction between darkness and endurance, which is the realist’s version of hope. It seemed obvious that every gesture we make to waylay loss—a walk taken, a symphony heard or composed—was either a trick on death or a transient reprieve, and I felt so saddened from this insight that I didn’t think I had much fight left in me. I remember trying to describe the state to friends and getting a smile of sympathetic, slightly vacant concern, as though they cared about but could not envision this forest where I had landed. I am trying not to generalize despair, I said, but I didn’t mean I was depressed—I wanted to explain the color of the world now. My inner dialogue felt like a stage direction for Shakespeare’s tragedies: Exeunt, with a dead march. Grief without hope is desolation, my therapist said to me one day, and I knew he was right and that I had to crawl out of where I was and somehow find a way to keep going. I needed the rambunctious miracle that would prove the lie.

  That’s a tall order for a puppy: rescue a human from an avalanche of grief, demonstrate daily the necessity of the forward march. Even Tula, one of the more confident dogs I have known, might have balked at the job.

  Now I have a sense of how much desperation eclipsed my judgment: I was heartbroken, and determined to repair the heartbreak as soon as I could—or at least cauterize the wound. Choosing to do so with a puppy from one of the more headstrong (and strong) breeds may not have been the most cautious decision in the world. I had no idea, that first summer, the degree of physical decline that was ahead of me in the next few years. But then one never knows what’s around the bend; that’s one of the sweet deals and limitations of consciousness. Otherwise we’d have died off eons ago, victims of our own paralysis or recklessness. If we knew what was coming no one would ever leave the house, or we might drive over every available cliff, or simply lose our minds from worry. What a monster that would be, peering into the future.

  And I doubt in my case that knowing would have made a whit of difference. I suspect I’d have just floored the gas pedal.

  In the months after Clementine’s death, I researched breeders and stared at online photos of Samoyed puppies, trying to find an image that would jump-start my heart. I spent a while contemplating a border collie instead of a Samoyed, which is a bit like choosing to date a flight pilot instead of a rodeo clown. Mostly, I sat on the back porch near the garden where Clemmie had liked to lie in the last few years, or wandered my house in aimless sorrow. I’m lucky I didn’t wind up with a llama in the backyard.

  The mind steered me toward what the heart required. In the late 1990s, I had been a regular visitor to New England’s largest dog show, where I went to watch agility and obedience competitions as well as conformation. Usually I came home from these excursions and cooed over Clementine’s unkempt beauty, telling her how lucky she was to have missed the cosmetic ordeals of a show dog. Then one winter I went to the dog show and saw a male Samoyed who took my breath away. Awaiting his turn in the ring, he was resting on a high platform, so majestic and calm he could have been a still life for the breed standard. I paid twelve dollars for the program just so I could find out where he came from, and I learned the breeder was a woman who lived on Long Island. It was 1997, and Clemmie was two years old, and I remember thinking that, while Long Island was more than a stone’s throw from Boston, when the time came for my next Samoyed, I was going to find this woman and her dogs.

  That majestic dog turned out to be Travis, a.k.a. Am/Can Ch. Sanorka’s Moonlite Trip t’Ren J BISS, and, eleven years later, I went looking for his breeder through the national breed club website. She had been breeding Samoyeds for nearly five decades and had recently moved to rural Pennsylvania. I wrote her and told her I remembered Travis from the Boston dog show; I included a long description of my experience with Samoyeds, a photo of Clementine and me on the beach, and two references from a veterinarian and a trainer. I knew the drill; I wanted to impress her before she had the chance to grill me.

  Janice was old-school. I realized it the first time I talked to her on the phone, when she didn’t try to push a dog on me. I knew it when I asked her some overly intense, searching question about how she knew something and she replied, simply, “Well, I’ve been doing this a long time.” She did a breeding only every couple of years, and I managed, by serendipity, to locate her the week after a litter of four females and three males had been born. She had one female available; she would be keeping one herself for show. Her kennel was five hundred miles away, and she told me she wouldn’t fly her dogs. And while
a part of me thought I was crazy, I remembered that I had had this woman in the back of my mind for more than a decade. So I sent her a check to, as she put it, hold the bitch.

  When the litter was just under six weeks old, I went to visit, to see what I was in for. I knew I would be coming back in two or three weeks, when the puppies were ready to go to their new homes, and mine would still be small enough to ride with me on the plane back. I flew to Baltimore, then I rented a car and drove across eastern Pennsylvania, through rolling country, visiting the old battlegrounds and the military cemetery. I had reserved a hotel room in the town square of Gettysburg, and after dinner I went for a late-night swim in the outdoor rooftop pool. Then I lay on the deck under the stars, thinking about my life. I was fifty-seven years old. I lived in a rambling old house in Cambridge surrounded by concentric circles of intimacy. To my surprise, and only some regret, I had never found anyone I wanted to marry. Too many creatures I loved were gone. The well-advertised fabulous fifties had been, for me, about sadness and soldiering through. The morning stretch had become a middle-aged groan; when I looked in the mirror, I saw the beginnings of my father’s aged face. How in God’s name had I gotten here?

  One of the quiet profundities of aging is when you realize that this is an ordinary and very un-profound moment. Inside every aging person is the ageless, blinking mind, asking, How did I get here? There may be a former linebacker inside the elderly man being helped across the street; the eighty-five-year-old woman selecting two oranges at the grocery store used to be a dancer, or a lawyer, or hoisted her children up over her head when they were small. It helps to know this, I think, because it widens the future, humbles you before the sovereignty of time. More important, it makes you reach toward the soul inside the rattled elderly lady ahead of you in the checkout line. You can see all the corners of the map in your fifties, probably for the first time in life. You still get to shape some of it, and finally have the sense to know how. I knew that, whatever paths awaited me, I wanted to be staggering forth with a Samoyed at my side. Or rather, given their propensity for pulling, charging along ahead of me.