New Life, No Instructions

by Gail Caldwell

  My mother straightened herself up and said, “Now listen, honey. Either I’ll wear this suit tonight, or I’ll wear it to his funeral.”

  We had dinner that night as promised, and S. was the one who was dazzled: my stylish West Texas mother, who was both humble and proud and afraid of no man. When I look back on that period of my life—the marathon thirties, when I got sober, fell in and out of love a couple of times, found work that I loved—my mother is a hovering presence throughout my inner landscape, even though I got to see her only about once a year. And I think it was then, when I was alone in a new city and finding my way, that I realized how strong she was, how utterly fearless when it came to protecting her cub. My father was the John Wayne patriarch who had scared half the boys in Amarillo during his daughters’ adolescence, and because his presence was so large and blustery and beloved, he had always seemed like the gatekeeper to my safety. But when I grew up and hit the four-lane highway of adulthood—when I was drunk and two thousand miles away, or falling apart over some man—it turned out to be Ruby who had my back.

  9.

  The most dramatic decisions I’ve made in my life feel now as though they were launched by a level-headed unconscious: leaving Texas, stopping drinking, getting clear of bad relationships. Occasional leaps of faith toward the unknown that seemed cockeyed or frightening but turned out well. This sort of broad jump was behind my getting Tula when I did. As much as I wanted a puppy before another winter took its toll, I think there was a more urgent imperative at work—some inner counsel saying, Do this now—we are working with a deadline here.

  By late autumn Tula had grown from eleven to thirty-five pounds, and had the stature and attitude of a small white wolf. I could still carry her around at that weight, and I have a photo of the two of us, with me looking skeptical but proud. She is poised on my shoulder with a queenly gaze that makes me laugh to remember it. The confidence that Janice and Carol had glimpsed in a seven-week-old puppy—“She pulls herself up,” Carol had written about her show-dog posture—asserted itself in adolescence with an imperious presence that was by turns lovely and horrifying. Tula expected the world to be a wonderful place, there to delight her. Occasionally she noticed that I had something to do with the way the day unfolded—its walks and car rides and tennis balls—but more often I was treated as an affable sidekick, or valet; like most sled dogs, she seemed to assume that her job was to lead and mine to follow.

  This is not a negotiation resolved quickly or simply. It takes a combination of brute strength, conviction, and good cheer to persuade Samoyeds that you are more important than their destination. They respond to praise and laughter, but if you bully them, they will simply sit down, look away, and refuse to move. If you lose patience at this point in the game, you will regret it. And if you yell at them or show anger, they will forgive you for being an idiot, but they will have made note.

  Walking in the woods one day, I met an elderly Russian man and his wife who smiled in delight over Tula, revealing their familiarity with the breed with the Russian pronunciation (“Ah! Sam-o-YED!!!”). They told me, in faltering English, about their experience with the dogs back in Russia. “Good dogs!” the man told me, smiling. “But they are not listening!” Indeed, sir, they are not listening, a present-tense state of mind that can seem as though it will go on forever.

  Tula came into her physical strength during one of the worst winters in recent history: ice and snow and relentless cold, all of which thrilled her and disheartened me. I had been teaching her to heel since the first few weeks she was home, and one afternoon when she was about nine months old, during a leash walk around the neighborhood, she lunged at the sight of a squirrel and almost took me down. I popped her collar and told her to settle; when I got no response I raised my voice and told her to sit. She turned and looked at me, and then raised up on her hind legs like a bear—a stance of all bluff that amuses me now but infuriated me at the time. It was the end of winter and I was exhausted; Tula’s energy and bearing had by now convinced me that I had a strong-minded dog who would prove a challenge to the ablest thirty-year-old. And so I yelled at her, standing there on the street in my Cambridge neighborhood, surrounded by houses with neighbors who knew us both. “I am going to win this battle!” I hollered, and Tula cocked her head, perplexed at the new words and new tone in my voice. Then she abandoned her fixation on the squirrel and trotted home next to me, undeterred and self-assured, no more interested in my moment of street rage than she was in yesterday’s dinner.

  While I have been remembering these early combat zones, Tula has gone to sleep on the brick patio in my backyard, a couple of yards away from me, with a fleecy blue sheep in her mouth. Before she drifted off, she was making little nibbling gestures on the toy, an oral comfort she has engaged in from puppyhood. It is a simulation of nursing at the mother’s teat, and I used to let her do this on my watchband or my T-shirt, so that she would tie that suckling instinct to me—so that she would let me be the lioness who adopted her. In return I vowed not to maul her, or make her my dinner. Maternal self-sacrifice is what keeps us from eating our young.

  She has grown into a magnificent, confident creature so aware that she can sense my every move and the tone in my voice from three rooms away. We love what we love in spite of ourselves, toward something larger and more generous than the velvet prison of self.

  Years ago, I met a woman who loved to photograph her beautiful daughter. She told me once, half-laughing, that she enjoyed looking at the photos more than raising the girl. The girl started stealing at sixteen, looking for love in all the wrong places. Maybe this is the narcissist’s lament, or maybe it’s just human: You love your daughter more on prom night than on the morning she announces she hates you.

  Will Tula start to steal? What’s the canine equivalent of acting out? I think we’re all right on that score; she knows thoroughly that she is loved. Dogs are the mirrors of our humanity. That’s one reason they get kicked around: They are such loyal witnesses, and bad people can’t stand to be seen.

  So I will choose the living, the choice we must keep on making. I will choose my living, imperfect, bossy dog over the glistening scrim of memories I have bestowed upon the past. We need imperfection in our relationships, else we would die from the thickness of intimacy. We probably need the I-hate-yous, the spit-up on the baby blanket, to be able to bear how much we love them.

  I do wish I could leave a few notes for the dead, to give them crucial details. To tell my mother that I am all right: strong and safe and still planting the field pansies and red geraniums she loved at the start of every spring. I would like my dad to know that his memory still causes a physical sensation of warmth in my heart, like being held from the inside out. I wish I could wrap my arms around Clementine, and tell her she’s my good girl always.

  And I wish Caroline knew how much my loving her, even after her death, has made me a better friend in the world. She would like that, I think.

  10.

  “This is a rotten dog!” Tula was trespassing in the bunny patch at Fresh Pond Reservoir again, and Ranger Jean was having a meltdown. For the past ten minutes I had been trying to coax Tula out of her Elysian fields, an off-limits marsh of grasses that held field mice and the occasional brown rabbit. When Jean drove by in her orange mini-truck, I was sitting on the hill gazing at the meadow, hoping that the park ranger might overlook a fifty-pound white dog pouncing at the ground in delight.

  Jean killed the engine, arranged her state trooper–like hat, and crossed her arms. “Looks like there’s a sheep on the loose,” she announced, and started down the hill.

  “White dog,” she hollered—futilely, given that Tula didn’t know she was a white dog—“get over here!” Tula pranced away. The worst thing you can do to catch a wayward dog, particularly a mischievous one, is to run toward it yelling. The dog was no fool: Why approach an angry stranger in a big hat?

  When Jean turned to me and declared, from twenty yards away, what a rotten dog Tula
was, my heart sank and I yelled back. “Don’t say that,” I shouted. “It isn’t helping.” I plunged into the marsh and slipped on a patch of grass; only then, when Tula saw me go down, did she run my way. I grabbed hold of her foot-long training lead and we headed up the hill to face our accuser.

  After I’d wriggled away from Jean’s lecture, I walked around, brooding. For months I had been immersed in the territory of off-lead training, using Shiloh the Belgian sheepdog as a role model, doling out chicken and exuberant praise. But Tula was proving enough of a huntress to require wide parameters to keep her safe. When her nose got the better of her, she ignored my commands with happy abandon. I liked to say it was easy to train a Samoyed as long as you had the right tools: in one pocket a bag of freeze-dried liver for the dog, in the other, a handful of Xanax for the human.

  Today Shiloh had waited nearby during Tula’s happy romp, then sat next to me while Jean and I talked, her sheepdog focus as fixed as that of a member of the K-9 Corps. I made a final loop of the peninsula with the dogs and stopped to rest. My cell phone interrupted my sad reverie; I knew it would be Peter, calling to check in.

  “How’s it going?” he asked.

  “I’m exhausted,” I said. “Tula went in the bunny patch and we got busted. Ranger Jean called her a rotten dog. My leg is starting to hurt. I think I’m losing my mind.”

  “Wow,” said Peter, already half-listening, even though he liked my dispatches from the front. “Sounds like a lot of drama.”

  “Oh, you know me,” I said. “Every day is a little bit of King Lear.”

  The external picture of those first two years with Tula must have been a far cry from my experience of the story. I remember being tired and grumpy all the time; in photos, I look ridiculously happy. My neighbor Nancy, who adored Tula and believed her incapable of bad behavior, used to cover her ears and sing whenever I would complain. And yet my dog’s intelligence outweighed even my worst frustrations; I was banking on it to keep her interested as well as to keep her safe.

  I began exploring woods in every direction outside of Cambridge, places vast and remote where Tula could run and I could train her off-lead without having a heart attack. She looked like a white wolf running through the woods, her nose and eyes giving her information I could only guess at. I knew that to call her in to me during the height of her excitement was futile, and could also be perceived as confining, so I began giving her instruction from afar. I walked a forest path while she ran in the hills and rises above it, and when she ran parallel to the path and looked my way, I praised her—“Watch me, good dog!”—without asking her to come in. I tried to give her enough rein to have her want to come back to me: an exacting formula that is different with every dog.

  One afternoon, toward the end of a long walk, when Tula was chasing squirrels on a steep hill, I started up in her direction, only to realize the incline was too difficult for me to scale. I grabbed a long stick and half-dragged myself up, wondering, as usual, what had possessed me to think I was a match for this animal. Two different breeders over the years had picked puppies for me they described as “very spunky.” Very spunky is cute at eleven pounds, less so at fifty. I had been flattered by those breeders’ assumptions, and I was suffering the consequences of my vanity. By the time I got to the top of the hill, I was out of breath and cursing, my heart pounding and my weak leg crying out in protest. Tula was waiting nearby, wagging her tail at my appearance and standing near an older woman who regularly walked there with her Labrador retriever. When she saw me scramble up the last few feet with my tree branch, the woman called out to me. “Good God!” she boomed. “You look as though you’re about to lance a boar!”

  This somber appraisal, delivered in an old Yankee diction, was funny enough to penetrate my vault of self-pity. I spent the rest of the walk contemplating the dissonance between her perception and my reality, her observation that I was charging forward with my staff while I felt I was staggering through space.

  The truth was that too many days lately I was limping instead of ambling. But I also knew that Tula’s adolescence was finite, and that my endurance race had an end in sight. If I could just maintain my strength for the next year or so, both of us—me and this indomitable creature I had chosen to love—were going to be fine. “Three years,” a trainer had told me, “and you’ll have a soul mate.” So far, that seemed about right.

  I had several dreams during this time that were the usual mumble of the unconscious under stress. Most of them were obvious, like the one where I was walking the neighborhood at 3 A.M. with a lion on a rope. But one morning I woke from a deep sleep trying to remember some absurd script I had been lost in. In the dream, Tula had been lying in a relaxed position, her front paws splayed outward, a familiar stance in real life that I referred to as seal yoga. Two men I didn’t know—I assumed they were physicians—came over and spoke to me with a sense of concern.

  “You’re handling this really well,” one of the men in the dream told me, and though at first I was confused, it became clear as he spoke that Tula had a degenerative muscular condition similar to ALS. What I had thought of as an endearing pose was in fact something terrible and progressive, a disease the doctors referred to as “brace.”

  I woke up with a start of fear and then relief, reassured by the sound of a healthy dog breathing a few feet away, and by the time I was fully awake I’d forgotten it. Until hours later, when I was walking the pond, and the dream came back to me. I thought about the oddness of the word brace—was it a brace of dogs, or a verb for the resolute nature of my task? My thickheadedness is testament to how thoroughly an old fear of mine had been repressed. It took another day for me to make the connection, and when I did I was driving, and I pulled over to the side of the road to write these notes to myself:

  brace. the name of the condition Tula had. killing slowly realizing seal yoga was inability to move. just realized 4 pm that brave [sic] is POLIO.

  Here’s the translation of that roadside shorthand: “Brace” was from one of the worst memories of my childhood, when our orthopedic surgeon advised my mother to make me wear a metal leg brace at night, with the goal of stretching my Achilles tendon. I think I was about five. She told me years later that she woke in the middle of the night to hear me screaming. I remember disconnected shards of the experience: the coldness of the metal, the searing pain that woke me, the territory between fear and helplessness that must be particular to a child’s experience. And I remember the sound of her running down the hall, which has eclipsed the misery of the night itself.

  The notion that I had planted this old memory onto my innocent young dog told me two things. One was how much I loved and wanted to protect her, in spite of the day-to-day frustration I felt about her antics. The second lesson was deeper, more obscure, and it took longer to figure out. It was this: that I had been tripping along through life in every sense, downplaying by light of day what had happened to me half a century earlier. But I was still frightened, at least on some dark, unspoken level. I suspect I had known for a while that the past not only wasn’t past, but that it might be getting worse.

  11.

  Boar-lancing fantasies aside, I was plagued by self-doubt during a lot of Tula’s young life, and only later did I see how much my sense of inadequacy had a physical base. Strength in a powerful dog is different from defiance, though I often mistook one for the other—when Tula wanted to go forth with an athlete’s exuberance, and I misread her eagerness as some insouciant wildness that I couldn’t tame. I knew I could outfox her, and probably outlast her (“I am going to win this battle!”). But much of training requires an agility I was realizing that I no longer had. Teaching a dog to heel means walking at different speeds and making quick U-turns; teaching a big dog not to jump on people is most effectively accomplished by grabbing her paws and dancing, or by planting a knee in the dog’s chest. My chief advantage, besides patience, was an obsessive nature: I didn’t mind the endless repetition that training demands. I’d been
teaching her commands of restraint since she was a puppy: “gentle,” for taking food or a ball from me, and “careful,” for slowing it down. If I took a pratfall in the woods or outside, she ran up to me and began licking my face—a sign of connection as well as concern.

  I had been falling a lot lately, and spending energy trying not to notice. Denial had long been part of my m.o. in fighting the aftereffects of polio, and sometimes it served me well, especially when it came to compensating for what my leg couldn’t do. I had good upper-body strength, and until recently I’d been able to rely on a makeshift balancing act to get around. But in the past couple of years, I had begun to lose my footing in ways that were annoying, then distressing. This had less to do with handling Tula, I had to admit, than with my own unsteadiness—or clumsiness, as I thought of it on the bad days. I didn’t just fall on ice; I fell on a clear sidewalk. I tripped; I stumbled; I lurched. And I always had a quick recovery at the ready, for myself and for everybody else.

  My limp was more pronounced when I was tired, more noticeable when someone viewed me from the front, walking toward them. Sometimes people I had known casually for years would ask why I was limping. My answer was standard, and went along these lines: “You know I limp a little, remember?” Or, “Oh, my leg’s sore; it’s just from rowing.” When strangers asked, I had an automatic answer that was quick and vague: “I have a bum leg; I’m fine.”