Carry

by Toni Jensen

  Where we open presents is upstairs in the living room. My niece runs around barefoot as she likes to do, even though it’s winter, as her father liked to do before her.

  My father’s house, a two-story ranch with a basement, was built into a hill, and sits on a small acreage just outside the small town in which I was raised. The basement used to hold all my father’s guns—dozens upon dozens of them—what some of us in the family called “the arsenal.”

  My daughter is in Texas, and I watch my barefoot niece closely while we’re there. She’s three years old, and I am alarmed each time my brother or my stepmother encourages her to interact with my father. It makes my heart beat faster. I watch my niece with meticulous care and now I watch the dog, too, making sure neither is alone with my father while I’m there.

  I’ve never left my daughter alone with my father, not once, though she’s twelve years old. I never will.

  In my family, we want to speak of my father like his dementia leaves him diminished and will also then leave him gentled. But this is not the pattern so far, nor is it the norm for people with dementia. According to the Alzheimer’s Society, “Aggression may be linked to the person’s personality and behavior before they developed dementia. However, people who have never been aggressive before may also develop this type of behavior.”

  I hope for the best for my father, who is the son of my grandmother, a woman I loved more than anyone. But my grandmother has passed on, and then my daughter was born. I love her best now. I will always love her best. I will always consider first what is good for her and second what is good more broadly.

  I still am guided, too, by what my grandmother would have wanted, to honor what she taught me, and I try to quiet my mind enough to hear it, to know it. She bore six sons, trying toward a girl. She treasured my sister and me and my girl cousins. She would have delighted in my daughter, who is named for her mother.

  Everything I’ve been taught makes the holding out of my arms to the past, to her, and also to my daughter, to the future, a necessary act. My father was her child. So I work hard to keep him in my life. I don’t know how to be a whole person otherwise.

  Because it’s Christmas, I want to include here a hosanna. I want to include here a saving grace. I want to say, the dog seems fine. I want to say, the dog is not even my dog. But Ellie the dog looks like approximately two-thirds of my childhood dogs, closer to three-quarters of the dogs my father’s ever owned. Whether he knows which dog, whether he knows which year, he’s done this thing, hit the dog, and we’re working toward the usual sort of holiday precipice, the edge of the cliff known as “to make a scene” or “not to make a scene,” to say something or to keep quiet.

  So far, the girlfriend and I are keeping quiet.

  I have, back home in my house right now, sleeping on my sofa, a very large dog named Bella Marie. She’s tan with black hairs interspersed in the fuzz. She sports a black, drooly muzzle and hazel, inquisitive eyes. She’s part Anatolian Shepherd and part Saint Bernard, we’re told, or maybe is a Leonberger. In either case, she’s fuzzy and decent and weighs in at around 120 pounds. She wants more than anything to understand what she’s supposed to be doing and then to do it. And then she wants only to collect her pets and perhaps a treat before lying down on the rug or sofa. She wants to play with our small dog, who is not very nice, but who has been won over by her dogged good cheer.

  In Bella’s first three years, before she came to live at my house, she was not a pet, was instead the thing we call a breeding dog. She and her breeding partner lived in Oklahoma, in some man’s yard. She gave birth to two litters of puppies, who were then sold to other people.

  The man didn’t feed Bella or her partner very much. He didn’t groom them or speak kindly to them or pet them. When she first arrived at our house, from how she ducked, it was clear he used something leash-like as a whip or maybe lasso. Eventually, neighbors grew concerned over how little food, how little water, and Bella and her partner were adopted by a shelter who placed her with a foster family. Claudia and her husband are the kind of people who say things like “We really want to keep her, but we already have too many,” while petting her head nonstop. They did such good work with her.

  She’s the kind of gentle dog who ducks or hides, watchful, or gives you her belly when she’s unsure. Dogs aren’t born that way, of course, they’re made. Claudia and her husband did good work to unmake the ducking, the watchfulness. It takes a week or two before Bella is certain our house will be as good as theirs.

  What I’m trying to say is that if my father had hit her, I would have had the impulse to kill him. When I get an impulse like that, my narrative brain goes to work so quickly, and I’m thinking already of the new deck they built out front, how unsteady he can be now with his balance. How easy. How easy.

  What I’m trying to say is that I would have ruined Christmas with, at best, shouting and leaving. What I’m trying to say is that my first impulse would have been toward violence. What I’m trying to say is that no part of me is proud of this impulse. It leaves me sick. It leaves me shaky. What I’m trying to say is I’m still in so many ways my father’s daughter.

  VI.

  My Christmas Eve wish is that my father will not hit another dog. There is a past version of me that would have wished my father not be allowed to hit another dog. That’s the wish of the present tense. What I want for Christmas is for my father not to hit another dog. It’s so close to wishing him dead, but that’s not how I mean it, either. I feel no malice, no sorrow.

  I feel reasonable and calm now, and I pet this dog, Ellie, whose wavy, black fur is soft. And I remind my niece how to pet a dog by showing her, and she’s good. She keeps calling her Bear, which is my little dog’s name, and she keeps petting and petting.

  When I was around my niece’s age, when I was three or four, we had a dog named Betsy with wavy, black fur and the body of a Lab but not the boxy, square head. Once, I’d been at my grandparents’ house overnight, and upon my return, upon our reunion, Betsy and I ran headfirst into each other, and I earned a concussion.

  Another time, when I was around the same age, I climbed the tall, white cabinets in the kitchen to the one nearest the ceiling, and I retrieved a bottle my mother had put there in what she thought was a secret act. But I had seen its bright contents, which looked to me like candy. When I retrieved the bottle and could not free the contents from the childproof cap, I handed it to Betsy, the dog, and we again collaborated.

  How much I loved candy then cannot be overstated. I could not be trusted around it. Candy was usually present only on holidays—and I was certain the bottle’s bright pills, hidden on the highest shelf, must be candy.

  As a grown person, I’ve tried enough candy to have grown indifferent to some of it. But I still can’t have Skittles or Hot Tamales in the house without eating the whole of the box or bag or bag of boxes.

  My mom’s pills were tranquilizers, and though this story has been told in my family dozens of times, no one ever addresses the tranquilizer elephant. Or maybe it’s obvious. My mother had a bottle of brightly colored tranquilizers because she lived in a house with my father.

  Because to live in a house with my father, a person would want that, would require it, would consume the candy-colored pills like Skittles or Hot Tamales, except, I imagine, with shame attached and without the attendant chewing of sugar, which is for me shame-free, which is pure pleasure only.

  That day, after I climbed the cabinets, after Betsy opened the bottle, after we’d both eaten many pills, my mother came out of the bathroom where she had been taking a shower. She dressed and got both of us into the car and drove us to the hospital, where the doctor pumped my stomach, where upon hearing the story, the doctor said to my mother, “What, did you drive the dog to the vet first?” It was winter. She had icicles in her Dorothy Hamill hair. She despised that doctor thereafter
.

  I don’t remember well that doctor or many of the people from my childhood, but the dogs of childhood were: Betsy, Daisy, Schmitty, Pup, and MacDuff.

  Back at Christmas Eve, in my stepmother’s kitchen, we are putting away a few last dishes. My stepmother asks, “How does he seem to you?”

  “Up and down,” I say, roller-coasting with my right hand.

  “That’s about right,” she says. “That’s how it is.”

  That’s been my overall experience with him in the last year, one of roller-coasting. When he called my daughter a few days ago, on her birthday, her name was a question in his mouth. But then once I handed her the phone, he sang her “Happy Birthday” in his beautiful tenor voice.

  Later, when I asked her about the conversation, she said, “He was on topic.”

  This is one of our euphemisms now, “on” or “off topic.”

  At the end of this Christmas Eve, my father is trying to remember which dog he brought with him when he visited me to go bird-hunting back in Valentine, Nebraska.

  “Frisco,” I say. I remember then how Frisco wasn’t house-trained and had to sleep in the screened porch, how I worried over whether he’d be cold until my father reminded me that at home, he slept in the barn.

  “Frisco,” I say again, and my father replies that of the hunting dogs, Shelby was “just about the best.” We have not been discussing Shelby, but I nod.

  When my father came to visit me in Valentine, I still had Jack and Lucy, who liked to run free through the same nature preserves and parks where my father and Frisco hunted birds.

  Sometimes when my dogs and I went out into nature, we left with their fur covered in ticks or porcupine quills. Sometimes Jack and I had to sit in the car and honk the horn over and over and over for Lucy to come back to us. Huskies are often part wild. She loved us, me in particular. She really did. And she loved being wild some days just a little bit more.

  One time, at the nature preserve, in the winter, three deer appeared across a large pond, and without hesitation, she took off after them, straight across the ice, and Jack followed.

  It was early winter, and I was not at all certain about the ice. I first had the impulse to take the fastest route, to chase them straight across, but I knew we were all doomed if I fell through. I held my breath as they made it across, even Jack at about ninety pounds, who galumphed when he ran, who was not fleet-footed and graceful like Lucy.

  I ran around the pond, hoping they would chase and chase the deer, hoping they would not run back across before I reached the other side. It is hard to run fast in that kind of cold unless you’re a husky, but I did my best. I galumphed, stiff-legged, around the pond. I did not think my heart could take watching them try to make it back across.

  This is what it would be like, day-to-day now, with my father if my heart were a different heart. If we loved each other differently. Each day I would watch him cross and hold my breath and hold my heart steady and I would walk around to meet him. Or maybe I would run. Or maybe I would walk across.

  In the Neighborhood

  I.

  The year I turn thirty I buy a house in a nice neighborhood in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and I live there with five young men, all college students, one of them my brother. The house has five bedrooms and an efficiency apartment above the garage, and the boys, as I thought of them then, as I think of them now, pay me rent, and this is how I afford to buy a house in Macalester-Groveland, one of the most sought-after neighborhoods in the Twin Cities.

  This is the summer of 2000, twenty years before George Floyd dies while police officer Derek Chauvin kneels on his neck, twenty years before protestors take to the streets of Minneapolis and Saint Paul and then to city after city, town after town, all over America. If anyone had asked me then, I would have said Minneapolis would be an unlikely starting point for such an uprising. It was, then and now, a place with considerable violence and inequity but also a place with strong multiethnic neighborhoods, effective grassroots organizations, and progressive laws.

  But the American Indian Movement started here in the summer of 1968 to combat both the poverty of Native people in the area and police brutality against them. In spring of 2020, the unemployment rate nears 15 percent. The Star Tribune reports that between January 2000 and May 2020, of the 195 people in Minnesota who died after a physical confrontation with law enforcement, 27 percent were Black; as of the last census, in 2010, only 6.19 percent of people in the state checked the box marked Black or African American. It’s not difficult to understand, then, how this place becomes the starting place.

  Back in the summer of 2000, on my own, I’m not able to buy a house in any neighborhood of this city. I have just moved from Valentine, Nebraska, from my rental house near where I was teaching on the Rosebud Reservation. I have a new job as a technical writer, despite not understanding much about technology. My salary puts me over the poverty line, but the line still is in spitting distance. No one in my new neighborhood uses phrases like spitting distance.

  But this is pre-2008, the bottom not yet falling out of the housing market, mortgage brokers still filling out paperwork with peak creativity. So I buy a house in the neighborhood, and we all move in, despite how it’s a speculative venture, at best, despite how I’m still poor.

  I buy the house for sale by owner. One summer day, I’m circling the neighborhood, street by tree-lined street, driving slowly, trying to imagine myself living there. The trees, tall maples and oaks, sit next to two-story or one-and-a-half-story houses built mainly in the 1920s and ’30s. Craftsman bungalows and Tudors, Colonial Revival and Prairie Style homes made of brick or painted cheerful colors.

  The neighborhood is within walking distance of the boys’ college, and already, on my way down the third street, I’m in love with the bungalows, the tidy yards and potted flowers in full bloom.

  On that third street, Sargent Avenue, a woman exits a Craftsman-style house with a sign almost as tall as she is. She begins working its post into the patch of lawn between the sidewalk and street. She’s tan, with light brown hair, and looks as strong as she is tall, that build and shape sometimes called rangy. I’m hovering, my car idling, and she waves me to pull over, so I park in front of the house, near the patch of grass that’s about to hold the sign.

  I never know what to call that patch of grass or dirt. I think of it most often as a no-man’s-land, a space not belonging to the homeowner, exactly, but one for which the homeowner is still held responsible. According to Webster’s, the phrase no-man’s-land was first used in the fourteenth century and originally meant “an area of unowned, unclaimed, or uninhabited land.” Other definitions include “1b: an unoccupied area between opposing armies,” “1c: an area not suitable or used for occupation or habitation,” and “2: an anomalous, ambiguous, or indefinite area especially of operation, application, or jurisdiction.”

  Is it no-man’s-land because when the phrase was coined, literally all land was no-woman’s-land?

  The space is most often called a road verge, but sometimes is called a berm, boulevard, curb lawn, parkrow, meridian, sidewalk lawn, or, my favorite, hellstrip.

  Webster’s has no definition for the phrase road verge, but verge, as a noun, means “1a: BRINK, THRESHOLD,” “1b: something that borders, limits, or bounds: such as (1): an outer margin of an object or structural part, (2): the edge of roof covering (such as tiling) projecting over the gable of a roof, (3) British: a paved or planted strip of land at the edge of a road,” or “2a (1): a rod or staff carried as an emblem of authority or symbol of office.” The obsolete definitions are my favorites and include “2a (2): a stick or wand held by a person being admitted to tenancy while he swears fealty,” “2b: the spindle of a watch balance, especially: a spindle with pallets in an old vertical escapement,” and “2c: the male copulatory organ of any of various invertebrates.”


  When the woman places the sign on the verge like that, right in front of me, it feels fated—like a literal good sign.

  “You’re the first one,” she says to me through my rolled-down car window. “The fliers are inside. Would you like to come in?”

  I nod and park alongside the sign.

  I consider the house’s paint; I don’t know what color to call the house—not quite purple or burgundy or dark brown, but something in the neighborhood of all three. This sounds like a hideous color but is not. The house, with its atypical color, pitched roof, and screened-in front porch, looks friendly, as does the woman, who’s still smiling at me.

  Inside, we walk through the rooms. This woman and her partner chatter about the work they’ve put in and the neighborhood and how they’re sorry for the mess though it isn’t particularly messy.

  The house holds original hardwood floors of a lighter color and a built-in buffet with a mirror in the dining room. There’s a less-than-excellent galley kitchen, too—really all the features of a period Craftsman.

  The remodeled basement holds two bedrooms, and the studio apartment above the garage off the alley holds a checkerboard, black-and-white tile floor. Though I know for now that this space will belong to one of the boys, I imagine myself writing up there someday. There’s good light through the windows and the alley is quiet.

  We’re already talking about the open house, about inspections and timelines, on the walk back from the garage. The partner goes to find a copy of a document for me, and when she returns, the two women huddle in the corner a moment, discussing something in hushed voices.

  I think maybe there’s already somehow another offer. I think maybe they’re going to tell me the disclosure will reveal mold or worse. Instead, they turn their faces away from the huddle and back toward me, and the tall woman says, “We like you, and we hope you get the house. But we need to tell you a few things about the woman next door.”