Authors: Charlotte Bacon

Tags: #Fiction, #Short Stories (Single Author), #test

A Private State: Stories (7 page)

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aged for the city in his tie and overcoat. ''I forgot to tell you. I've got a breakfast meeting. Good luck with the dog." Thick with sleep, Lillian barely heard her husband. The pillow smelled of flea collar and pine, Duncan's smell. He hadn't woken her for the first time in years. She felt guilty for being able to rest at all.

Making coffee, Lillian remembered the vet's assistant had suggested one of those terrible posters. Telephone poles and bulletin boards layered in announcements of jobs available and sofas for cheap, as if a lost dog were remotely equivalent to the sale of a three-piece sectional.

Still, Lillian found herself driving at 8:45 to the Xerox shop with a picture of the dog she had taken last Christmas. It was blurry, Lillian never being very good with cameras, which were left to Owen and the boys, silently, profoundly, absorbed in all things technical and geometric. In the snapshot Duncan wore a wide green ribbon.

The man at the counter blinked at his customers from behind glasses as round as a pair of full moons. He himself might have been the moon, he was that spherical and pale. But no, Lillian thought, he reminded her more of a grounded cloud. His name tag said "Let me help you. I am JIM P." The capitals suited him.

"Hello," Lillian said, "Do you think this photo will Xerox all right?"

Jim examined it and Lillian felt a pang of discomfort showing this stranger her dog. For a moment, she saw Duncan as others must: eyes silver with cataracts, cars and rear end too large. She wanted to snatch the picture from Jim's dimpled hand and cry, "He's mine, at least, he's mine."

But Jim said, "What a great dog. He's got a kind of wit about him."

"Yes," Lillian said, "That's it! That's just it!" That was just the word. Duncan was dry in his ploys to steal and bury shoes and tennis balls. She explained she needed the copies because he was missing.

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''Well," sighed Jim. He confessed that his Siamese, Pitiporn, had just died.

"Pitiporn?" Lillian asked. Name of a ducal family in Thailand, Jim explained.

"Ah," said Lillian. "How sad."

"Great cat," he said somberly. "She was an absolutely great cat." He suggested orange paper for Lillian's flyers. She agreed to the bright color, but decided against the personal appeal from the dog. Last week she'd seen an embarrassing poster that said, "Hi My Name is Kelp. I'm A Much-Missed Chocolate Lab." Lillian's text stressed "Reward'' instead, as if kidnappers were waiting greedily for posters decked with dollars. When she offered a twenty, Jim raised his palm and said quietly, "On the house today."

Lillian smiled her thanks, not trusting herself to speak, and headed out to the parking lot. The light today was lovely, even for heading off to post notices of a lost and ragged dog in malls built on land that once belonged to dairy farms. It occurred to her today those old fields might have been such a violent green thanks to some pesticide people liked to use back then.

At a bagel bakery where she taped a sign, the cashier asked what had happened. Lillian said her dog was gone. The signs were in case he didn't find his way back.

"You mean he's going to come home all by himself?" Lillian saw the girl's tag said her name was Kris.

"I know it sounds odd," said Lillian, "but they have a tremendous instinct for it."

"In their little dog hearts they just know?"

It was true, Lillian protested. As a girl, she'd had a dog who walked twenty miles along a highway to come back to her. She'd forgotten this 'til she told Kris, but it had actually only been five.

"Loyalty," said Kris, seeming impressed. "That's wild. But why would he leave?"

"Someone took him," Lillian said, "right from the yard."

"Hmm," said Kris. She had a shock of goldfinch yellow hair

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that came, as people used to say, from the bottle. A dab of cream cheese partially masked the K on her name tag. Duncan rarely just wandered off, Lillian explained. Perhaps a child who'd seen him decided to take him home. When the parents saw the posters, they'd return the dog. This was one of the stories Lillian told herself under the comforter last night. It sounded even thinner in fluorescent light, lox and hazelnut in the air.

Kris picked up a plastic knife and smoothed the surface of a bucket of margarine. "You have too much respect upon the world: they lose it that do buy it with much care," she said to the knife, clearly quoting. It had to be Shakespeare, but all Lillian could do was smile and hope she looked knowing and appreciative. Kris loaded some day-old bagels in a sack. "Here," she said, thrusting the bag into Lillian's arms. ''I hope my instincts are wrong."

That evening, Lillian told Owen "I put up signs all day, I found out our taxes pay for a road-kill officer, I plugged in that answering machine and nothing." They were in the kitchen, and though it was late, neither had eaten. Lillian dusted some web from the machine, which had once belonged to the boys. "You're sweet, but our dance cards aren't that full," she'd said and waved the contraption away as if it were a wasp, the same gesture she'd used to reject microwaves and computers, also offered secondhand. Today, she'd rescued the machine from the attic and spent an hour deciphering instructions before the red eye began to blink.

Well launched on a bottle of Soave, Lillian rambled about Jim P. and Kris, the quoting girl, the false intimacy of nametags. Rooting in a cupboard, Owen came across the bagels. "Shakespeare?" he said and looked inside the bag. "What are these doing here?" he asked, holding up a poppy-studded roll. Owen and Lillian had moved from New York at a time when bagels were still ethnic food. Their breakfasts were white toast, bacon, black coffee, a meal from another century.

"The quoting girl gave them to me. Do you recognize this?

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There was something about having too much respect for the world and losing it."

Owen chewed some bagel. "
Merchant of Venice
" he said after a minute. "You have too much respect upon the world: they lose it that do buy it with much care. Hah!" he said, pleased. "Why was a girl in a bakery quoting Shakespeare?" Luck

"I don't know," Lillian said. She was abruptly exhausted. She was thinking that she would die if she couldn't scratch the roll of skin on Duncan's neck soon. That Owen and some sad girl at a mall were probably the last two Americans to soothe themselves with great, old books. That more shells had fallen in Bosnia today. She'd read the headlines in spite of herself. Picking up the paper from the stoop, she'd also seen Emma's owner crossing the street, gray in the face, wearing one pearl earring.

"I'm not cooking," Lillian said forcefully and tipped the last drops of wine into her glass. "Twelve people were killed in a Muslim safe area today."

Owen had undone his tie. "We could go to that Italian joint," he said.

But they might miss a call from someone who'd seen Duncan.

"Lillian," Owen said, putting down his bagel, "no one's going to call."

"Owen!" Lillian cried, pounding the counter. The bagel fell to the floor. "How do you know that?" She picked up the roll, gray with lint and dog hair, and to their mutual surprise, threw it hard at Owen, who, with a wildly lucky grab, just kept it from shattering his wine glass.

Lillian was sorry it hadn't broken. "I'm not cooking," she said again and thumped up the stairs. Once there, she didn't know what to do with herself. After pacing the hall, she decided to take a bath to escape the framed family photos. She turned on the tub, plopped into the steamy water, and, recalled the early months of her first pregnancy. She and Owen were living in New York and

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the city had seemed to swirl with germs and trouble. She remembered jackhammers pummeling a sidewalk to dust as she cradled her stomach and thought, I need a home, and the vision that came was of doors with locks and gates that closed with a solid clack of metal.

Just before Andy was born, they'd chanced onto this house and Lillian entered twelve years of frankly housebound domesticity. Broken bones and parts denied in plays had seemed lapses of luck. Once Owen got fired. Friends divorced; there'd been untimely cancers. Much had made her sad: bombs on Cambodia, lying presidents. A niece, pretty and wayward, dead of heroin at twenty-two. But even looking up from tulips and seeing America gone star-crossed never really made her worry that Arnold's bread would not get baked or well-trained dogs not come when called.

Soaping her arms, she wondered what childhood in this soft place had really done to her sons. They'd become implacable adults: tall, employed, at ease with hard drives and work that required more time on airplanes than land. If they were nervous about their prospects in this chancier era, they didn't tell Lillian. They had words for everything. Even not having a job for a spell was called rethinking their options. Every situation could be coaxed to yield good fortune.

She should feel lucky to have raised such solid children. But tonight, floating in the warm water, wondering where the dog had gone, she couldn't stop remembering when gravity first became her children's ally. "Get off that bike now or I will pull you into the house myself," she'd told John soon after he turned ten. Hannah, the corgi before Duncan and sensitive to family upset, was barking her head off.

"I won't," he screamed. Lillian marched over, dragged him off the bike and abruptly became aware she could not hold this squirming mass of boy whom 'til now she'd been able to move as if he weighed no more than a pachysandra.

He broke from her arms and ran to the overturned bike, whose

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wheels spun and clicked. "I hate you!" he shouted. The spokes were sharp and silver in the evening light. Hannah had turned her snout to the sky and howled. Who are my sons? Lillian wondered, clean arms lying on the water, remembering how the glints off the spokes had pierced her.

Gravity also did terrible things to skin, she thought, looking at Luck her hands, and drinking did terrible things to memory. The wine retrieved the boys, then Hannah, and now she missed both sons and two old dogs. Her thinking blurred with children and old pets, she was angry with herself for never letting the boys know how sharply the world could crack, how women, animals, and children could fall inside. Women in Sarajevo didn't have to say a word about that. Women there knew all about the fact that books read, money saved, and azaleas planted couldn't save you when, for no earthly reason, your luck just blew away. Bombs in market squares did the work for them. Duncan, Lillian knew, was really gone.

She was floating in the now-cool water when she heard Owen call, "Lillian! Phone!" She hadn't even heard the ring. The air struck her wet skin and the towel barely covered her body. Oh, I've faded, she said to herself. I'm a fat old woman now. Dripping a wide circle on the bedspread, she picked up the receiver. Owen was on the kitchen extension. "Hello?" she said.

"All right!" an unfamiliar voice answered. "Everyone here? Hey, did you know your machine's not working?" This was said in a rather accusing way, though casually. The accent was not of the East.

"Who is this?" Lillian said, holding the phone firmly.

"Holly Allen. I'm calling from the Grand Junction Animal Shelter? We've got a corgi here named Duncan who'd probably like to talk you."

"Colorado?" was all Lillian could say. "What's he doing in Colorado?"

"Good Lord," said Owen.

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"He just came in. One of our animal-control officers found him on Route 70."

"Is he all right?" Lillian found herself shouting. "What happened to him?"

"Lower your voice, Lillian," Owen said.

"No clue, but he's fine," Holly said, still casual. "Where's this I'm calling anyway?"

"Connecticut," Owen said faintly.

"Wow," said Holly. "Hey, Duncan, want to say hi to your parents?" Lillian heard a rustle that could have been someone rattling papers into a neat sheaf. "Hey guys," Holly called to her colleagues, ''the corgi's from Connecticut." Then she asked, ''Folks, is he on any medication?"

Lillian couldn't answer. She was picturing Duncan's nose stuck out the window of a stranger's car, ears pinned flat with speed. Duncan trundling along the shoulder of a highway that shone with broken bits of windshield and dead crows. Duncan safe. Why, Lillian wondered, clean and cold and dripping, why am I disappointed?

Two days later, she told the baggage attendant at the airport, "I'm here for my dog." He led her to a dim room that smelled of cardboard and diesel fuel. His overalls had "José" stitched into a pocket. "This your little guy, ma'am?"

"Yes, he's mine, José," Lillian said and felt, for the first time since she'd known Duncan was returning, a solid thrill of pleasure. "Duncan," she called and then he was in her arms, a bundle of old-dog claws and tongue and tail. She held him at arm's length and looked at him, the same brave, rare way she'd looked at her own face in the morning light just after losing the baby. How awkward he was, such bowed legs, cataracts milkier than ever. What catastrophic breath. How she loved him.

José asked, "So what happened here?" Duncan in her arms, Lillian told the attendant about the disappearance, the making of

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