The electricity goes out.
Roo roo roo roo! Woof woof woof. A symphony of barks, howls, and rolling thunder. Finally, a flash so bright and so close, it seems the lightning has certainly touched the earth, and later we learn that a tree has fallen and crushed a section of fence. In no time, our fields of delicious high grass are full of happy sheep.
The neighbor’s flock has taken advantage of the chaos, and I think that’s pretty smart.
SIXTEEN
oBVIOUSLY, THE THING TO DO NOW IS TO BUY A mule. That’s what I’m thinking, as I zoom like a maniac down Daniel’s Run Road, one of the pretty tar and chip roads Billy showed me. I am getting good at back roads. I am loving back roads. Back roads make you feel like you belong.
A mule. I should get Alex a mule. Okay, but what exactly is a mule? I see cows and sheep and a few horses passing by my window, but no mules. At least none that I can identify. What exactly does a mule look like? And why did Alex say he wanted a mule? Did he even have a reason? Does he even know what a mule is? Well, I don’t know. Details, details. I should get him a mule. The mule will be a surprise. A wedding present! The mule will come clippity-clopping up the driveway at precisely the right moment on September 13—exactly nine days before my thirty-ninth birthday. My wedding day.
It’s June. So much has happened since the ladybug invasion, since spring arrived and the warm winds blew away bad news, blew it away as if it were nothing. Nothing! A nothing that opened our eyes. A nothing that gave way to everything. Everything we do now, every action we take seems to be about cherishing. Cherishing each other. Cherishing the sun. Cherishing the farm, the animals, every blade of grass.
I am in love. It just so happens that I am in love. I am in love and I am getting married. I am planning a wedding. A real wedding. Which should be quite some accomplishment, seeing as I am not the wedding type. Or I didn’t used to be. I didn’t grow up having fantasy weddings in my head. In fact, I’m finding that I am having to cram a whole lifetime’s worth of fantasy weddings in my head. This latest one, the one with the mule, yes. I am liking this one:
The mule will have flowers in his hair. Her hair? People will be standing around, sipping champagne, laughing and pointing at this mule clippity-clopping up the driveway. Alex will be surprised! He will hold his stomach laughing. He will look at me, he will have his eyes all scrunched up, like, “What? What is this for? Why is this animal here?” And I will say … um. Okay, what will I say? Um.
I have to think of a line.
But first I have to get a mule. Where do you buy a mule? Can I get one by September 13?
I am zooming past cows and chickens and pigs, past pretty little barns, an old schoolhouse, a blue trailer, a stately old farmhouse with a pool. I’m late. I told Alex I would be home hours ago. But hey, a bride’s gotta go on her own clock. A bride! Here comes the bride! I am in my bride stage. Big-time. In fact, I am just returning from Wedding World. Yeah, I was nervous. Of course I was. It was the first bridal shop I ever entered on purpose. And why don’t they spruce these bridal places up? That’s what I was thinking. Wedding World was in an aqua blue building, low and flat, and it said WEDDING WORLD across the top in extreme pink lettering. The mannequins in the windows were sad and decrepit and way too skinny for the flashy gowns they were wearing. One of the mannequins was missing an eyeball. “Sorry, girls,” I said, walking by. I didn’t really know what I was apologizing for. Just maybe the fact that I was sure to make a better-looking bride than they were. Maybe the Wedding World people did this on purpose. Maybe this was some way of encouraging a woman’s frightened, insecure inner princess to come out. Maybe I was reading too much into this.
The saleswomen in Wedding World were way overdressed for such an ugly building, that’s what I thought. I looked around for Nancy. She was supposed to meet me there. Where the hell was Nancy?
A woman walked up to me. Maybe sixty years old, she had half-moon glasses with a silver chain hanging in arcs on either side, and she had a big red hairdo done up in a series of very complicated knots.
“Can I help you, sweetie?”
“I’m waiting for Nancy,” I said.
“Party or bride?” she said.
“Excuse me?”
“Are you in the bridal party, or are you the bride?”
“Oh, well, I’m the … bride,” I said. “But so is Nancy.”
She removed her glasses and let them land, plop, on her ample bosom. She looked me up and down. “Okay, we had this once before,” she said. She swallowed. “We really don’t need to go into any detail. Just tell me the date.”
“Mine is September thirteenth and Nancy’s is October twentieth,” I said.
“Oh!” she said, letting out a relieved giggle. “Oh! I was thinking—well … you never know in this day and age.”
And it finally dawned on me that she thought Nancy and I were marrying each other. Oh, dear. We were not off to a running start.
“Follow me,” she said, and led me into a dressing room. Mirrors everywhere. Mirrors over my head. Yikes. She stood me on a platform. She looked at me, sighed. “Let me guess,” she said. “Simple and elegant.”
“Huh?” I said.
“You’re looking for something simple and elegant,” she said, picking a pin up off the floor.
“How did you know?”
“Because that’s what everyone says.”
“Oh.”
“And one girl’s simple and elegant is another girl’s gaudy and tacky,” she said, sticking the pin into a cushion she wore around her wrist like a watch. “So let’s get started.”
“But I’m waiting for Nancy,” I said as she trotted out of the room. Somehow this wasn’t how I imagined life for my outed inner princess.
She returned with a heap of white dresses. It took her a moment to untangle all the trains. “Now, hon, these are samples. We order you the real thing. So don’t pay attention to the dirt or the smell.”
“Okay.”
The dresses, five of them, were big, thunderous numbers. Dresses with so many sparkles and poufy things sticking out, they could probably run power plants.
“Um,” I said to her. “I’m not quite sure—”
“Honey,” she said. “Be blunt. I’ve got thousands of these things. I’ve been doing this for twenty-five years. Nothing hurts my feelings.”
“Oh,” I said. “You know, heh heh, I’m sort of discovering my inner princess, heh heh….”
“Oh, Lord,” she said. “You know what, I’m going to give you one of the new girls to work with.”
Just like that, she left. Rejected me. It was an inauspicious debut for my inner princess. I had no idea that a princess had to have such thick skin.
I sat on the platform and rested my chin on my fist, waiting for the new girl, waiting for Nancy. I thought: I should have played the Miss Delaware card, told her who I really was.
Yep, that’s what I should have done, I’m thinking now, as I zoom home. I am beginning to believe my own hype. I am beginning to believe that I actually am a former Miss Delaware, that I actually went on to compete at the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City and lost out to some babe from Missouri with big teeth. Life in inner princess land is all about fantasy.
I am zooming home, without a wedding dress, but with an education.
I head up the driveway and wave to Alex, who is down at the pond throwing sticks for the dogs.
“I’m late!” I say, pulling over and hopping out of the car.
“How did it go?” he says.
“Not too great,” I say, unable to complete my thought due to the dogs attacking me, jumping up with their muddy paws, covering my shirt with pond goo and my hands with welcome-home licks. Marley, Betty, and our new dog, Wilma. We got Wilma last month, kind of as a celebration dog. A welcome-to-the-future dog, right after the cancer scare. Only we didn’t put it that way. We just called her our love puppy. She’s half yellow Lab and half golden retriever. She’s eight months old now, blossoming
into a beautiful truck of a dog. She has an enormous square head, a “good Lithuanian head,” we like to say. She is completely drenched with pond water, wagging her tail with such gusto that the whole back half of her body wags along with it, and she has a four-foot-long log in her mouth. Wilma doesn’t play stick; she plays log.
“Okay, girl,” I say, grabbing it. I wind up and give the log a whirl. It splashes a good twenty feet beyond the shoreline. Wilma takes a running dive in after it. She paddles through the water, so purposeful. So stalwart. A dog on a mission.
“Finally, a dog that actually fetches,” Alex says. He loves this dog. “Look at her,” he says. “Doesn’t she look like a sea otter?”
“You mean a sea lion,” I say. “Like, a seal?”
“No, a sea otter,” he says.
“A sea otter?”
“A sea otter is a seal,” he says.
“No, that’s a sea lion,” I say.
“No, a sea otter,” he says.
“You’re right,” I say, even though I’m pretty sure he’s wrong.
“What?”
“I said, ‘You’re right, dear,’” I say. “Even though I’m pretty sure you’re wrong.”
“What?”
“I am past such petty games,” I announce. “Because I am … a bride!” I hold my arms up in the air, charge in a circle like a victorious prizefighter.
“Oh, dear,” he says. “I thought you didn’t find a dress.”
“I didn’t,” I say. “But I learned a lot. I learned that I am not doing sparkles. I am not doing lace. I learned that I am … totally satin.”
“Well, good,” he says, leaning over, patting his knees, encouraging Wilma to get the log back safely.
“But don’t tell Nancy I told you,” I say.
“Huh?”
“Bride rules,” I say. “You don’t even discuss dress matters with the groom.”
“Wow,” he says. “What happens if you do?”
“Um. Bad bride karma. You get a curse put on you. Suddenly you come down with a bad case of bad taste, and you buy one of those giant sparkly gowns with poufy things sticking out everywhere. That’s how people end up with those dresses, you know.”
“Wow,” he says. “Being a bride is dangerous.”
“It ain’t for sissies,” I say.
Wilma is paddling her way back toward the shore, huffing and puffing, like, “Here you go! I did it! I did it for you!”
Betty is waiting. Roo roo roo roo! Betty doesn’t actually go into the water for sticks or logs or anything else you throw. She waits for Wilma to do the dirty work, waits for Wilma to get that thing out of that water, then she steals it, runs off as though she was the one who braved the pond to get it, head held high. Typical movie star. Wilma stands there, drenched, logless and alone.
“Sorry, Wilma,” Alex says. “Betty, that is not fair.”
It goes on like this. God forbid Betty should get her feet wet. Betty has stopped rolling in dead things, too. Betty is getting more and more princesslike out here. I sort of thought she would go the other way. I was half-expecting Betty to discover her inner tomboy dog out here in the country. Betty and I are so much alike.
Marley is sitting in the shade, uninterested in the swimming or the game. Poor Marley. A lot has happened to Marley over these past few months. At the moment, he has mange. I don’t know how he got mange. But the mange has caused him to itch uncontrollably, which has caused him to scratch incessantly, which has caused all his fancy poodle fur to fall out. He is now a hairless poodle. He looks like a stick drawing of a poodle—with scabs.
“Poor Marley,” I say to Alex.
“At least he’s coming out of his groundhog stage,” he says.
“One can only hope.”
For a while there, Marley was catching one groundhog per day. It was sad. It was such overcompensating. Plus, it was hard on Bob. Because Marley started using Bob as his practice groundhog. He’d come inside, all stoked up on his hunter hormones, and he’d see Bob and tear after him. Bob took to living high atop bookcases and on the TV.
“Have you noticed that Marley is moving into some sort of FedEx truck stage?” Alex says.
“Yeah, what’s up with that?”
“Maybe he’s waiting for a package?”
Marley has become so enamored of that FedEx truck. My God! The last time Tim came moseying up the road, Marley became downright deranged. He saw the truck approaching, leaped to his feet, and began running in tight little circles around the maple tree, woof woof woofing around and around and around, until the truck got up the driveway, at which point he ran in circles around it. It was some odd dog behavior, all right. A hairless poodle going ballistic around a FedEx truck.
“Poor Marley,” Alex says.
“He’s having one identity crisis after another,” I say, taking yet another log from Wilma and giving it a whirl.
“At least he’s not attacking Bob anymore.”
“No, he isn’t. Somehow he knows.”
“All the animals seem to know,” Alex says. “Wasn’t that something last night?”
“Snoozing in a lump,” I say, smiling. “Three dogs and cat, snoozing in a lump.”
“I should have taken a picture.”
“Well, I don’t really want to remember Bob looking the way he does now,” I say, trying to erase the picture in my mind, which of course only sharpens the focus. As my vet predicted more than a year ago, Bob has become quite sick. He hardly eats at all anymore. He’s getting scrawny. His fur has lost its orange luster, dimming to brown. His once-mighty tail has become as skinny and floppy as the branch of a willow tree. And he’s nearly blind.
All the animals know. Alex knows. I’m the only one who refuses to … know.
“So what time does Riva get in tomorrow?” I ask Alex, changing the subject, as I often do when the conversation turns to Bob.
“I think about five or six,” he says. “I have it written down.”
“Well, that will perk the party up around here.”
“She is living for this wedding,” he says. “It will be her crowning achievement.”
Even though she lives in Israel, somehow Alex’s cousin knew that Alex and I were in love long before either of us did. Sometimes it seems as though Riva is omniscient.
Riva is seventy-four. She spends a few months with Alex every other year or so. She’ll be staying with us through much of the summer, helping with the wedding plans, visiting, cooking, bossing everyone around in her immutable Riva way. “You must eat potatoes today! You must sit in the sunshine! You must not sleep on your stomach!” Alex and Riva look alike, even move alike. They love each other in a way that runs deeper than I think I can possibly comprehend. Alex and Riva are the only surviving members of an entire Levy clan, most of which was killed in the Holocaust. Riva herself was a teenager in a ghetto in Lithuania. She escaped, only to learn that her own mother was killed in reprisal. By the time the war was over, she had lost her father, grandfather, and brother and nearly all her cousins, aunts, and uncles.
Her Uncle Saul was safe in America. Riva remembered him. She knew he had a baby girl, Marina. As the years went by, she heard about his having a son, Alex. But Riva would not meet these American cousins for many, many years, not until she was in her late sixties, living in Israel. She took a trip to America. Alex was already in his forties. He told Riva what happened to her Uncle Saul, his father: He never recovered from the pain, from the news, from the realization that the family he had left behind in Lithuania had all died at the hands of the Nazis. Alex’s father became an angry and bitter man, with much of his rage, inexplicably, directed at his only son. As a boy, Alex didn’t understand any of this. Alex just thought life would be a lot easier if he didn’t have a dad at all.
“Come here, Mar,” Alex calls. “Don’t you want to play?”
“Yeah, I thought poodles were water dogs,” I say. “Isn’t that what you told me?”
“I did. And they are.”
&nbs
p; “So why doesn’t Marley ever swim?”
“He’s … busy,” Alex says, smiling as he goes over to his dog. No matter how weird Marley gets, Alex is there for him. I like that about him. It gives me hope for our old age. He sits with Marley under the tree, leans back in the shade. I watch them, cherish them, because this is what I have learned to do. I have a whole new appreciation for Alex’s shoulders, for his forearms, and for the inquisitive arch of his eyebrows. I wonder if his father had this arch, if Alex has his mother’s eyes, where on his face his parents might be found.
Alex’s father died when Alex was a young man, with a young wife and two babies, Amy and Peter.
Losing his father was a pivotal event in his life. You would think, perhaps, that it would have been a relief, losing a father who was cruel to you. But it wasn’t. It was losing the chance of having a father who would ever actually be kind to you, would ever really know you, would ever like you.
Then, just before the funeral, the young wife, she walked out of the marriage.
Alex was alone, with two kids to raise.
Then his mother died.
The sequence of events put a bruise on Alex’s heart, a pain he believed might never go away. In his darkest moments, back then, he came to the conclusion that he had only one thing to do with his life: get his kids raised. And then he could be done. Then he would wither away, like a dried-up leaf falling from a tree.
“Wilma, no!” Alex says. “Wilma, go away! Wilma, sit!” Wilma doesn’t seem to care that Alex wants some quality time with Marley. She’s leaning her soggy Mack-truck self into him, licking him, unable to control her love.
“Wil-ma!” I shout, just like Fred on The Flintstones. “Wil-ma! Come!”
It works. Wilma comes over and bombards me instead. Alex and I have learned to help protect each other from Wilma’s love attacks. We have taught each other a lot about love. Even before we fell in love. Or knew we had fallen in love. Way before.
I came into Alex’s life while he was getting his kids raised. Amy and Peter were blossoming into young adults. I remember when Alex told me about his dad, his mom, his divorce, his darkest days, about withering away. I remember we were having spaghetti. I was thirty-three, he was forty-eight. We had been introduced by a mutual friend; for a while there was a group of us, all self-employed, all working in neighboring buildings, who would meet for lunch. Alex and I liked to talk about writing. He had an interest in writing. He even had some notes for a book he wanted to write. We would talk about stories, we would read each other’s work and cheer each other on. I remember thinking: This is not a man who is withering away.
Fifty Acres and a Poodle Page 20