Dear Life: Stories (11 page)

It was summer when we moved to the trailer. We had our dog with us. Blitzee. “Blitzee loves it here,” my mother said, and it was true. What dog wouldn’t love to exchange a town street, even one with spacious lawns and big houses, for the wide-open countryside? She took to barking at every car that went past, as if she owned the road, and now and then she brought home a squirrel or a groundhog she’d killed. At first Caro was quite upset by this, and Neal would have a talk with her, explaining about a dog’s nature and the chain of life in which some things had to eat other things.

“She gets her dog food,” Caro argued, but Neal said, “Suppose she didn’t? Suppose someday we all disappeared and she had to fend for herself?”

“I’m not going to,” Caro said. “I’m not going to disappear, and I’m always going to look after her.”

“You think so?” Neal said, and our mother stepped in to deflect him. Neal was always ready to get on the subject of the Americans and the atomic bomb, and our mother didn’t think we were ready for that yet. She didn’t know that when he brought it up I thought he was talking about an atomic bun. I knew that there was something wrong with this
interpretation, but I wasn’t about to ask questions and get laughed at.

Neal was an actor. In town there was a professional summer theater, a new thing at the time, which some people were enthusiastic about and others worried about, fearing that it would bring in riffraff. My mother and father had been among those in favor, my mother more actively so, because she had more time. My father was an insurance agent and travelled a lot. My mother had got busy with various fund-raising schemes for the theater and donated her services as an usher. She was good-looking and young enough to be mistaken for an actress. She’d begun to dress like an actress too, in shawls and long skirts and dangling necklaces. She’d let her hair go wild and stopped wearing makeup. Of course, I had not understood or even particularly noticed these changes at the time. My mother was my mother. But no doubt Caro had noticed. And my father must have. Though, from all that I know of his nature and his feelings for my mother, I think he may have been proud to see how good she looked in these liberating styles and how well she fit in with the theater people. When he spoke about this time, later on, he said that he had always approved of the arts. I can imagine now how embarrassed my mother would have been, cringing and laughing to cover up her cringing, if he’d made this declaration in front of her theater friends.

Well, then came a development that could have been foreseen and probably was, but not by my father. I don’t know if it happened to any of the other volunteers. I do know, though I don’t remember it, that my father wept and for a whole day followed my mother around the house, not letting her out of his sight and refusing to believe her. And,
instead of telling him anything to make him feel better, she told him something that made him feel worse.

She told him that the baby was Neal’s.

Was she sure?

Absolutely. She had been keeping track.

What happened then?

My father gave up weeping. He had to get back to work. My mother packed up our things and took us to live with Neal in the trailer he had found, out in the country. She said afterwards that she had wept too. But she said also that she had felt alive. Maybe for the first time in her life, truly alive. She felt as if she had been given a chance; she had started her life all over again. She’d walked out on her silver and her china and her decorating scheme and her flower garden and even on the books in her bookcase. She would live now, not read. She’d left her clothes hanging in the closet and her high-heeled shoes in their shoe trees. Her diamond ring and her wedding ring on the dresser. Her silk nightdresses in their drawer. She meant to go around naked at least some of the time in the country, as long as the weather stayed warm.

That didn’t work out, because when she tried it Caro went and hid in her cot and even Neal said he wasn’t crazy about the idea.

What did he think of all this? Neal. His philosophy, as he put it later, was to welcome whatever happened. Everything is a gift. We give and we take.

I am suspicious of people who talk like this, but I can’t say that I have a right to be.

He was not really an actor. He had got into acting, he said,
as an experiment. To see what he could find out about himself. In college, before he dropped out, he had performed as part of the Chorus in
Oedipus Rex
. He had liked that—the giving yourself over, blending with others. Then one day, on the street in Toronto, he ran into a friend who was on his way to try out for a summer job with a new small-town theater company. He went along, having nothing better to do, and ended up getting the job, while the other fellow didn’t. He would play Banquo. Sometimes they make Banquo’s Ghost visible, sometimes not. This time they wanted a visible version and Neal was the right size. An excellent size. A solid ghost.

He had been thinking of wintering in our town anyway, before my mother sprang her surprise. He had already spotted the trailer. He had enough carpentry experience to pick up work renovating the theater, which would see him through till spring. That was as far ahead as he liked to think.

Caro didn’t even have to change schools. She was picked up by the school bus at the end of the short lane that ran alongside the gravel pit. She had to make friends with the country children, and perhaps explain some things to the town children who had been her friends the year before, but if she had any difficulty with that I never heard about it.

Blitzee was always waiting by the road for her to come home.

I didn’t go to kindergarten, because my mother didn’t have a car. But I didn’t mind doing without other children. Caro, when she got home, was enough for me. And my mother was often in a playful mood. As soon as it snowed that winter she and I built a snowman and she asked, “Shall
we call it Neal?” I said okay, and we stuck various things on it to make it funny. Then we decided that I would run out of the house when his car came and say, Here’s Neal, here’s Neal! but be pointing up at the snowman. Which I did, but Neal got out of the car mad and yelled that he could have run me over.

That was one of the few times that I saw him act like a father.

Those short winter days must have seemed strange to me—in town, the lights came on at dusk. But children get used to changes. Sometimes I wondered about our other house. I didn’t exactly miss it or want to live there again—I just wondered where it had gone.

My mother’s good times with Neal went on into the night. If I woke up and had to go to the bathroom, I’d call for her. She would come happily but not in any hurry, with some piece of cloth or a scarf wrapped around her—also a smell that I associated with candlelight and music. And love.

Something did happen that was not so reassuring, but I didn’t try to make much sense of it at the time. Blitzee, our dog, was not very big, but she didn’t seem small enough to fit under Caro’s coat. I don’t know how Caro managed to do it. Not once but twice. She hid the dog under her coat on the school bus, and then, instead of going straight to school, she took Blitzee back to our old house in town, which was less than a block away. That was where my father found the dog, on the winter porch, which was not locked, when he came home for his solitary lunch. There was great surprise that she had got there, found her way home like a dog in a story.
Caro made the biggest fuss, and claimed not to have seen the dog at all that morning. But then she made the mistake of trying it again, maybe a week later, and this time, though nobody on the bus or at school suspected her, our mother did.

I can’t remember if our father brought Blitzee back to us. I can’t imagine him in the trailer or at the door of the trailer or even on the road to it. Maybe Neal went to the house in town and picked her up. Not that that’s any easier to imagine.

If I’ve made it sound as though Caro was unhappy or scheming all the time, that isn’t the truth. As I’ve said, she did try to make me talk about things, at night in bed, but she wasn’t constantly airing grievances. It wasn’t her nature to be sulky. She was far too keen on making a good impression. She liked people to like her; she liked to stir up the air in a room with the promise of something you could even call merriment. She thought more about that than I did.

She was the one who most took after our mother, I think now.

There must have been some probing about what she’d done with the dog. I think I can remember some of it.

“I did it for a trick.”

“Do you want to go and live with your father?”

I believe that was asked, and I believe she said no.

I didn’t ask her anything. What she had done didn’t seem strange to me. That’s probably how it is with younger children—nothing that the strangely powerful older child does seems out of the ordinary.

Our mail was deposited in a tin box on a post, down by the road. My mother and I would walk there every day,
unless it was particularly stormy, to see what had been left for us. We did this after I got up from my nap. Sometimes it was the only time we went outside all day. In the morning, we watched children’s television shows—or she read while I watched. (She had not given up reading for very long.) We heated up some canned soup for lunch, then I went down for my nap while she read some more. She was quite big with the baby now and it stirred around in her stomach, so that I could feel it. Its name was going to be Brandy—already was Brandy—whether it was a boy or a girl.

One day when we were going down the lane for the mail, and were in fact not far from the box, my mother stopped and stood quite still.

“Quiet,” she said to me, though I hadn’t said a word and wasn’t even playing the shuffling game with my boots in the snow.

“I was being quiet,” I said.

“Shush. Turn around.”

“But we didn’t get the mail.”

“Never mind. Just walk.”

Then I noticed that Blitzee, who was always with us, just behind or ahead of us, wasn’t there anymore. Another dog was, on the opposite side of the road, a few feet from the mailbox.

My mother phoned the theater as soon as we got home and let in Blitzee, who was waiting for us. Nobody answered. She phoned the school and asked someone to tell the bus driver to drive Caro up to the door. It turned out that the driver couldn’t do that, because it had snowed since Neal last plowed the lane, but he—the driver—did watch until she got to the house. There was no wolf to be seen by that time.

Neal was of the opinion that there never had been one. And if there had been, he said, it would have been no danger to us, weak as it was probably from hibernation.

Caro said that wolves did not hibernate. “We learned about them in school.”

Our mother wanted Neal to get a gun.

“You think I’m going to get a gun and go and shoot a goddam poor mother wolf who has probably got a bunch of babies back in the bush and is just trying to protect them, the way you’re trying to protect yours?” he said quietly.

Caro said, “Only two. They only have two at a time.”

“Okay, okay. I’m talking to your mother.”

“You don’t know that,” my mother said. “You don’t know if it’s got hungry cubs or anything.”

I had never thought she’d talk to him like that.

He said, “Easy. Easy. Let’s just think a bit. Guns are a terrible thing. If I went and got a gun, then what would I be saying? That Vietnam was okay? That I might as well have gone to Vietnam?”

“You’re not an American.”

“You’re not going to rile me.”

This is more or less what they said, and it ended up with Neal not having to get a gun. We never saw the wolf again, if it was a wolf. I think my mother stopped going to get the mail, but she may have become too big to be comfortable doing that anyway.

The snow dwindled magically. The trees were still bare of leaves and my mother made Caro wear her coat in the mornings, but she came home after school dragging it behind her.

My mother said that the baby had got to be twins, but the doctor said it wasn’t.

“Great. Great,” Neal said, all in favor of the twins idea. “What do doctors know.”

The gravel pit had filled to its brim with melted snow and rain, so that Caro had to edge around it on her way to catch the school bus. It was a little lake, still and dazzling under the clear sky. Caro asked with not much hope if we could play in it.

Our mother said not to be crazy. “It must be twenty feet deep,” she said.

Neal said, “Maybe ten.”

Caro said, “Right around the edge it wouldn’t be.”

Our mother said yes it was. “It just drops off,” she said. “It’s not like going in at the beach, for fuck’s sake. Just stay away from it.”

She had started saying “fuck” quite a lot, perhaps more than Neal did, and in a more exasperated tone of voice.

“Should we keep the dog away from it, too?” she asked him.

Neal said that that wasn’t a problem. “Dogs can swim.”

A Saturday. Caro watched
The Friendly Giant
with me and made comments that spoiled it. Neal was lying on the couch, which unfolded into his and my mother’s bed. He was smoking his kind of cigarettes, which could not be smoked at work so had to be made the most of on weekends. Caro sometimes bothered him, asking to try one. Once he had let her, but told her not to tell our mother.

I was there, though, so I told.

There was alarm, though not quite a row.

“You know he’d have those kids out of here like a shot,” our mother said. “Never again.”

“Never again,” Neal said agreeably. “So what if he feeds them poison Rice Krispies crap?”

In the beginning, we hadn’t seen our father at all. Then, after Christmas, a plan had been worked out for Saturdays. Our mother always asked afterwards if we had had a good time. I always said yes, and meant it, because I thought that if you went to a movie or to look at Lake Huron, or ate in a restaurant, that meant that you had had a good time. Caro said yes, too, but in a tone of voice that suggested that it was none of our mother’s business. Then my father went on a winter holiday to Cuba (my mother remarked on this with some surprise and maybe approval) and came back with a lingering sort of flu that caused the visits to lapse. They were supposed to resume in the spring, but so far they hadn’t.