It Occurs to Me That I Am America

by Richard Russo

“Damn, she’s not easy to look at,” Anthony said.

  “She was found chained up outside a flag factory near Chattanooga,” Joelle said. She felt compelled to explain the sad history behind every dog here. “She doesn’t have a name yet. You want to give her one?”

  “How about America? For that flag factory.”

  “All right.” She did not love his choice. In the lead-up to the election, the American flag had become a sort of threat. Someone down the road had mounted a swimming-pool-sized flag across the front of their garage and a red sign on their lawn that read TRUMP THAT BITCH.

  “America,” Joelle said. The bloodhound grunted and licked the nub where her fourth leg would be. “Let’s hope that next week, the country is better off than this dog. The polls have been making me nervous since that Comey thing about her emails. I mean, let it go already.”

  “Right,” Anthony said.

  Given the tenor of the election and all that was at stake, Joelle spoke more freely about politics than she ever had in years past.

  Anthony glanced at his watch, then over at Joelle. He ran his eyes across her shoulders and toward her stomach. He thanked her for showing him around and said, “I should head out. I won’t be able to come back here and start until February.” He explained that he had a studio apartment down in the city, that he had to go to London and Madrid for work, and he had promised to take his niece on vacation to Mexico after Christmas. “She lives five minutes from this place.”

  “Mexico? Lucky girl,” Joelle said. She led him toward the front of the shelter again.

  “I work for Hyatt, so I get to stay in their hotels at a discount,” he said. “And my niece is going through a rough time.”

  “You’re a generous uncle.”

  He looked down and shrugged. When his eyes returned to her, his face changed. “So, will we get to be here together, you and me?”

  “Maybe. Probably.”

  “Good,” he said, and pointed a finger at her. “Lucky you.” He smirked.

  “Oh yeah?”

  “We’ll see.” He rolled his eyes in a way that was hard to read.

  She flushed and laughed, and they said goodbye. She watched him cross the dirt parking lot in an appealing half saunter.

  Seven months ago, Joelle had moved up from Flatbush. She had left her job in Brooklyn Heights. She had left her boss, Sean O’Donnell, who had liked to hide brown and black dildos in her desk drawers and watch her unexpectedly find them. She had left her married boyfriend of ten months, a third-grade teacher, although technically Evan was the one to initiate the breakup a polite two weeks after her abortion.

  She got a job in Peekskill at a new venture capital firm that specialized in women-run tech companies. She Ventures, located in a renovated mill, consisted of five people: Joelle; three local women in their forties; and their assistant, Beryl, a recent Vassar graduate. For lunch, the five women often walked together to the salad bar at a nearby health-food store. Joelle rented a tiny but charming low-ceilinged farmhouse just a few doors down from the dog shelter. Her new life in the small, quiet town was good and virtuous, but also chaste, as if she had moved out of a Jackson Pollock painting and into a landscape, maybe a Monet.

  • • •

  The country elected the enraging candidate, the months passed, and everything was going to hell. Before heading to She Ventures each morning, Joelle called the offices of her congressional representatives with concerns about threatened immigration and health-care laws. With her colleagues, she attended the Women’s March in New York. She set up monthly donations to the ACLU and gave a hundred dollars to a Kickstarter fund for a Jewish cemetery, where dozens of grave markers had been tipped over and spray-painted with swastikas. At a gas station in her town a man ripped off a Muslim woman’s hijab and yelled at her and her infant son: “Go back home.” What was previously a quaint and pretty town had come to feel menacing, the possibility of hatred lurking in every trip to the grocery store or CVS. In general, Joelle had been hovering just above despair with the occasional dip into hopelessness. Her mood was not buoyed by the news updates that she ingested regularly on her iPhone, despite her best efforts to limit her intake.

  Her own life became as uncertain as American democracy. Two of She Ventures’ biggest investors backed out and reinvested elsewhere. Beryl found a job working for the Planned Parenthood headquarters in New York City and for more than two months now, She Ventures had been without administrative support. Joelle’s inbox ballooned, a paralyzing sight that too often drove her to procrastinate by checking various news websites. Was he still president? Had anything changed? Despair, despair, and yet another vow to stop reading so much news.

  On the last day of January, Joelle’s father was diagnosed with breast cancer.

  “Jesus, Mom,” she responded to her mother when she first called.

  “His doctor caught it early and thinks he’ll be fine. There’s no reason to share this with anyone, Jo. To be honest, Dad’s a little embarrassed.”

  “Oh, come on, Mom.” Such gender-based humiliation irritated Joelle perhaps more than it would have if the country did not seem like a sexist swamp now that a woman had been robbed of the presidency.

  “Jo, the man has cancer,” her mother said. “Give him a break.”

  That day, Joelle saw Anthony’s name on the volunteer schedule alongside her own for the following week. Was it possible that this was in fact a setup? When she moved up here, Joelle had poured out her sorrows about Evan to her step-aunt, a longtime widow whose one adult child had moved away. Candace, who was short and wore her gray hair in a bun like a baker woman in a nursery rhyme, was heavy with unused love. Lately she had been suggesting that Joelle try dating again, but Joelle had balked. The only men she had met up here were either married to her colleagues or living with their parents and clearly depressed. The sight of Anthony’s name on the schedule was a small but real beam of light in an otherwise dim time.

  When the morning arrived, she washed and blow-dried her hair and put on a pair of skinny jeans that Evan once said made her ass look amazing. She applied some mascara and her favorite shade of lip gloss and headed to the dog shelter.

  “Long time, no see,” Anthony said. He sat on the front stoop.

  “How was Mexico?” She went for her keys.

  “Other than a bad case of food poisoning, one lost suitcase, and a totally insane cabdriver, pretty good.” He explained that his niece, not he, had gotten sick, but that she was all right now. In fact, he had just come from her house.

  “Things have been so quiet here since the election,” she said once inside the shelter. “I swear, it feels like everyone is bracing for something catastrophic. Who wants to commit to owning a new dog right now, let alone some shelter mutt that might turn out to be sick or bad with kids? Waffle did get a nice home last week, this really sweet family who drove up from Tarrytown. But America’s still here.” Most days, the dog just rested her head on the torso of a purple teddy bear and slept. To prospective owners, Joelle had talked up the dog’s soulful howl and kind, unique eyes—two different colors! People inevitably smiled, nodded sympathetically, and moved on to the dog in the next cage. “Poor, hobbled America. She’s down one leg and the respect of the rest of the world.”

  “What?”

  “Remember, the bloodhound? You named her.”

  Anthony nodded in a way indicating that he did not remember.

  In Joelle’s estimation, to name one of them was to establish a link. She herself had named dozens of dogs here. Last month, when Seymour’s new owner came to take him home, she had cradled the old dachshund mutt, reluctant to walk him out front. Seymour had been the name of Joelle’s guinea pig when she was a child.

  “Hold on—I’ll be right back,” she said, and strode toward the kennel room. Over the months, she had gotten to know and like America, the way the dog nuzzled her snout against Joelle’s arm or dropped it like a heavy sponge onto her leg when she was sitting. Candace had tied a red banda
nna around her neck that worked as a bib and mostly took care of the drool problem. Joelle opened the latch on America’s pen and hooked a leash to her collar.

  “Oh man! That ugly three-legger,” Anthony said when he saw Joelle and the dog.

  “She’s a sweetheart. Give her a chance.”

  “Those dogs don’t get killed if they don’t find a home, do they?”

  Joelle vigorously shook her head. Most likely, though, America would live here for a year or two, no one would take her, and she would get sick and die. Joelle had seen it happen before. This was a no-kill shelter but not, of course, a no-die one, and plenty of dogs spent their final days here.

  Now seated behind the front desk, Anthony pulled his sweatshirt over his head, revealing a green T-shirt that said What part of “meow” don’t you understand? A pro-woman message, Joelle thought—or was it simply pro-cat?

  “Joelle, right?” he asked.

  She nodded and unclipped the leash from America. The dog hobbled around the desk and sat next to him. He reached over and stiffly patted her big head.

  “There you go,” she said. America began to lick the knee of his pants. “She likes you. Look at her!”

  He half smiled. “I’d rather look at you,” he said.

  Her face burned. She understood that she might sleep with him, if only once or twice. She had slept with a Pakistani guy two years ago and her college boyfriend was half-Hispanic, but she had never hooked up with a black man. She liked the thought of it.

  “Any chance you want to grab something to eat after we’re done here?” he said. “It’s a long drive back to the city.”

  “Yeah. I know a great pizza place two minutes from here.”

  • • •

  Fourteen months earlier, Joelle and Evan had sat at a bar in Flatbush drinking dirty martinis. His wife was visiting her parents in Ohio. Heart’s “Barracuda” played overhead as they ordered their third set of drinks. Joelle told him what her boss had been hiding in her desk, and Evan burst out laughing.

  “How is that funny?”

  “Were they huge? I mean, you know.”

  Joelle rolled her eyes. For a third-grade teacher, Evan could be awfully raunchy, and lately he had been pushing into thornier, uglier territory. She thought of the first time that she had slept with this married person, when she had been a raw nerve as they ripped off each other’s clothes on her roommate’s sofa and he covered her collarbone with hickeys. Honestly, had she ever been more alive? He and his wife rented an apartment in the same building. Joelle had met him folding his boxer shorts in the laundry room.

  “Sorry,” he said at last. “Your boss sounds like an asshole.”

  “He is. Yesterday, he asked me for a paper clip, and then he just stood there staring at me, obviously waiting for me to see what he’d put in my top drawer. I literally screamed.”

  “Must have been a shock,” Evan said, trying not to smile.

  “You want me to hide a plastic vagina in your desk at school?”

  “Actually—” His eyes shimmered.

  “Fuck off.”

  “Come on, Jo. You know I’m kidding.” She was supposed to be the fun one, the guy’s girl who was game for anything.

  She watched Evan move his swizzle stick around his glass, his slow blinks revealing that he was more than a little tipsy. He had a pale baby face with crystalline blue eyes that had once made her smolder, but lately he called to mind an acclaimed movie actor who had just been outed for sexually harassing his costars.

  “Hey,” he said, “men are terrible, horrible, no-good creatures. Is it okay if we go back to your place now? Because those jeans make your ass look fucking amazing.” His breath warm in her ear, he sang, “You’d have me down, down, down on my knees. Now wouldn’t you, barracuda?”

  Later, she berated herself for stepping in line, for ending up in bed with him that night, for allowing him to forgo a condom a few weeks later, for ceding herself to sex again and again, for returning repeatedly to a married man. She knew better than to commit such an act against another woman. She had been a women’s studies major at Smith, for God’s sake.

  • • •

  “What made you want to volunteer so far from the city?” she asked Anthony after explaining her own move north. They sat across from each other in a wooden booth, a small pizza on the table between them.

  “My niece lives up near here with her mom. I guess it’s a chance to see her. We both like dogs, and I figure I can bring her with me when I volunteer. It’d be something for us to do together. She couldn’t come today because she had a basketball game.”

  Joelle wondered if he had told Candace of his plans to bring his niece every week. “You two are close.”

  “Yeah, we are,” he said, and reached for a second slice. “My brother, her dad, used to say that he liked dogs more than people, that dogs were easier for him to be around.”

  “He ‘used to’? What changed? The dogs or the people?” She smiled.

  “He got killed. A cop shot him.”

  “Oh my God.” Joelle could guess the rest—white cop, car on the side of the road. The girl left with no father. His niece, of course, his niece. It was a story that never got easier to hear—and had to be infinitely harder to tell. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Thanks,” he said, his eyes on the pizza.

  She grew embarrassed for what she had just said, which had been nowhere near enough or the right thing, whatever that was.

  A Taylor Swift song played. Two lanky teenage girls skulked past in North Face jackets. Some guys behind the counter bantered about Tom Brady. Everything was Caucasian and vapid. “Can I ask what happened? You probably don’t want to talk about it,” she said.

  “It’s okay. It was on the news a lot—it was in the Bronx last year? Couple of white cops. Marcus was standing outside a Duane Reade.”

  She vaguely remembered reading about a man selling packs of cigarettes near some drugstore, or was she thinking of another shooting? There had been so many.

  One of the teenage girls began to cackle. She made a scene of laughing and choking on her drink.

  “I wish she would shut up,” Joelle said. She shot a disapproving look at the girls.

  He turned to see them. “Kids being kids.”

  The girl’s friend held her phone sideways in front of them. Care what other people think of you, Joelle could have said. Be better people as young white females. “Her friend is taking a selfie of them licking each other’s faces.”

  “Nice,” he said, laughing.

  Maybe he was right. Maybe in some way, there was something obliquely funny about it.

  Afterward, he offered to walk Joelle home and touched her lower back as he moved behind her. “You cold?” he asked, and she shook her head. The air was bearable outside the restaurant, and she lived only a few minutes from here. “Come on, take my hat. You’re so small. You have to be cold.” He pulled a red-and-blue-striped ski hat from his pocket. Worried about seeming like a germaphobe or worse, she took it.

  Inside her house, he wandered around her antique kitchen, stopping to look at the bumper stickers she had affixed to her fridge: RESIST; WELL-BEHAVED WOMEN RARELY MAKE HISTORY; BLACK LIVES MATTER, one that right now made her both proud and self-conscious. “Drink?” she asked him.

  She poured him a glass of pinot, and he set it on the counter, reached down and tucked her hair behind her ear. She stood on her tiptoes and kissed him, and he lifted her and she wrapped her legs around his waist. His body was dense and strong and irresistible, and their mouths sealed together, his breath strong with pepperoni pizza. She guided him toward the bedroom. They fell backward on her mattress, she on top, but then he lifted her and turned her so that she was beneath him as they continued to kiss.

  Anthony pulled off her shirt and easily unclasped her bra. He traced his finger around the words tattooed across her left breast, just atop where her heart was located: I Am Enough.

  “Hey now,” he said.

 
; “It’s a feminist thing. I got it with some friends when we worked for a rape crisis center.”

  “That and the dog shelter? Are you trying to be everybody’s hero?”

  She smiled in a twitchy way.

  He pulled off his shirt and engulfed her right nipple with his warm mouth. She arched her back as the sensation of his soft tongue registered inside her spine. “That’s why I’m here?” he whispered. Leaning on one arm, he went to unbutton her jeans. “You going to try to save me or something?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “A black man whose brother got shot by a white cop?”

  “No.” Her skin tightened everywhere. She shrank away.

  He said, “I don’t have a problem with it. I’m good with this.” He began to tug her pants down.

  “You shouldn’t say things like that. You should think better of yourself.”

  “Oh yeah?” His hand on his own zipper, he froze. “What else do you want to tell me to do?”

  “It’s not, I don’t—I mean—I like you and you’re really hot. This has nothing to do with—” She could not manage to say the word pity. They had lurched so quickly onto this horribly thin ice.

  “Can we get back to business?” he said. He slid off his pants and they began to kiss again.

  But her mind was stuck in the previous moment. She had to make things right before they went any further. “We’re not so different, you know, women and black men, people of color, I mean in terms of the harassment and the persecution, all the violence. The micro- and macroaggressions—like every day. Believe me, I have stories. Yes, I don’t have to worry about white cops and being shot, but it’s not so easy for us women, even white women. We get lumped in with white men—and blamed because so many white women voted for him, but it’s not so simple.” She had meant to sound woke—she thought she was woke—but her words moved in the air like desperate little flies buzzing around for some kind of food that did not exist.

  He looked at her. “Do you still want to fuck?”

  She blinked and nodded.

  He slid on a condom, and they moved efficiently and quietly and quickly. She told herself to enjoy his toned arms and muscular ass and his flawless dark skin, but she could not manage to shake a binding self-consciousness.