“It’s nothing,” David calmed.
“But why won’t he stop barking?” Tuck continued.
David knelt down and put his arm around his son comfortingly. “Tuck, it’s okay. This place is new for Ben just like it’s new for you. He just needs to tell everyone that he’s here.”
Tuck seemed to accept the explanation, but was still gazing in Ben’s direction when Melanie appeared at the front door of the cottage.
“Tucker, come inside, I need you to help me unpack your stuff.”
“Okay, Mom,” Tuck yelled as he ran into the house. David smiled, pleased that Melanie’s request had taken Tuck’s mind off of Ben’s unusual behavior, as he once again hoisted the box onto his shoulder.
After dinner that evening, David noticed that Tuck was glued to the television, newly installed in the living room of the cottage. Katy, as usual, had her nose in a book and was curled up in an armchair some distance away. David directed his attention toward Tuck.
“Have you finished that book on dolphins yet?”
Tuck looked up disconsolately. “Nooo,” he groaned.
“Have you done
any
reading today?”
Again Tuck replied in the negative.
“Well don’t you think you should get a little reading in before you go to bed?”
“Oh,
Dad,
I’m watching television.”
“I know, but I thought you and I had an agreement, that every day you would get just a little reading in?”
At that moment David felt Melanie tugging at him gently from behind. He looked at her and she gestured for him to follow her into the entranceway. They made it a point never to discuss the children in front of the children.
She looked at her husband softly. “Don’t you think that today’s a special day with the moving and all? I mean, he’s only six years old. He’s been running around like a banshee all day and he’s exhausted. Couldn’t he have an occasional reprieve from the heavy reading schedule you demand of him?”
“Oh, honey, but he’s watching television.”
“You watch television.”
“Only the news, and an occasional educational show. Did you see what he’s watching?
Benny Hill
.”
She sighed. “I know, but every once in a while it’s not going to kill him.”
“But it’s mindless.”
“But every once in a while it’s good to be mindless, like when you’re exhausted, or battle-fatigued from having your entire world shifted beneath you. And sometimes just for the sheer joy of doing something mindless.”
He grimaced.
She looked at her husband imploringly. “Don’t you remember how it was being a kid?”
This caused him to regard her sharply. Of course he remembered. He remembered his father ripping up his books if he caught him reading. He remembered drunken brawls, the perpetual mist of alcohol around his father’s face. That was why he was so driven in his own thirst for knowledge, why he was so demanding of his children, so critical of their friends. David’s father had been a factory worker and a horror. He had wanted David to grow up fulfilling only his strict mold of what it meant to be a man. In short, to learn to fistfight, to eschew books, to become a factory worker, and ultimately to end his life as he himself had, accomplishing nothing, learning nothing, and dying, a spent and broken man amidst an ocean of beer cans and empty Jack Daniel’s bottles.
That was when Melanie put the final nail in her argument. “You don’t want to end up as demanding as your father was, only in the opposite direction, do you?”
He looked at her solemnly. No, indeed, he did not want to end up like that. “Very well,” he conceded. “I guess it won’t hurt him to watch
Benny Hill
every once in a while.”
He walked back into the living room. “Tuck, if you want to just watch television tonight, go ahead. You can read some more of the dolphin book tomorrow.”
“Thanks, Dad,” Tuck chirped obliviously, his eyes remaining glued to the glowing tube.
David spent the rest of the evening helping Melanie put the house into some semblance of order. When night finally came he found to his surprise that he was actually looking forward to the unconsciousness of sleep. Normally, he was so consumed in his studies, his own reading, and the constant racing of his thoughts, that he usually found it difficult to pull away from it all and go to bed. Tonight, however, he was quite looking forward to being lost in the arms of Morpheus.
He went upstairs, but before going into his bedroom he paused to look in on the children one last time. He knocked on Katy’s door first.
“Just a minute! Don’t come in!” she screamed immediately from beyond.
David smiled. She had become so excruciatingly modest and vulnerable since she had entered adolescence. There was a time not too many years back when she would have paraded around in front of him with just a pair of shorts on, but suddenly she had become acutely self-conscious about even the most innocent of things. This afternoon, while they were unpacking the trailer, a pair of her simple cotton panties had fallen out of a box in front of him and he thought she was going to die of embarrassment. Nonetheless, he knew that he had to do everything in his power to refrain from showing his amusement at such incidents. He knew that it was all a part of growing up.
“Ready yet?” he called.
“Okay,” she returned.
He opened the door. When he entered he found her sitting up in bed with her flannel nightie laced tightly around her neck and looking decidedly unhappy.
“Katy, what is it?” he asked as he sat down on the bed beside her. He felt a sinking feeling, assuming that her disconsolation could only be due to their recent move. For several long moments she said nothing, and he gently took her hand. “Katy, won’t you tell me?”
Finally, she looked at him, her eyes revealing that she was still struggling to find the words to express her misery, and then at last she spoke. “Oh, Dad, why did you have to name me Katharine?”
This was not at all what he had been expecting, and he had to think about it for a moment. “What’s wrong with the name Katharine?”
“It’s just that it’s such an old-fashioned name,” she said. She fidgeted nervously, and he realized there was still something she wasn’t telling him.
“Come on,” he prodded, “this is me you’re talking to. What’s caused you to suddenly become so unhappy about your name?”
Again she looked at him agitatedly, still reluctant to confide the truth, and then finally she came out with it. “I don’t like the name Katharine because it’s the same name Catherine the Great had and Rupert Riesdale in my fourth-hour history class told me that Catherine the Great died while she was having sex with a horse.” David just sat blinking silently for several moments. Again, this was not what he had expected. His initial reaction was to be appalled at what his thirteen-year-old daughter had just come out with, but he decided the best tack was to take it in stride and deal with it calmly.
“Well, I’ve heard that story also, but as far as I know it’s apocryphal.”
“What’s
apocryphal.
“Greatly in doubt. Most sources I’ve read say she died when an artery ruptured in her brain, and she was alone in her bed at the time.”
Katy seemed only slightly appeased.
“And besides, we didn’t name you after Catherine the Great. We named you after Katharine Hepburn. Just before you were born your mom and I saw her in
Pat and
Mike
and we liked the movie so much we started thinking about the name. Does that make you feel any better?”
Apparently it did not, for Katy looked at him sulkily. “I was named after an actress?” she asked disparagingly.
“Well, sort of. But there have been lots of amazing women throughout history named Katharine. You were named after them too.”
“Like who?”
“Like Catherine of Aragon, Queen Isabella’s daughter, or Catherine de Medicis, widely respected for the shrewdness she displayed in her influence on the governing of France.” He judiciously neglected to tell her that Catherine of Aragon was the first of Henry VIII’s ill-fated wives, or that Catherine de Medicis was also widely touted for the powers of deceit and treachery that she had inherited in her Medici blood.
Katy began to soften.
Trying a new approach, David said, “Well, if you had been there to be consulted, what would you have rather been named?”
“Natasha,” Katy replied without blinking.
He scoured his memory for famous Natashas in history, but drew a blank. “Where did you get that name from?” he asked.
Her face grew slightly red. “From the Natasha on that cartoon show with Rocky and Bullwinkle,” she said sheepishly. “I just like the sound of the name better.”
David’s heart sank, but slowed in its descent when he realized that at least she had blushed. He consoled himself with the affectionate realization that she was still in a curious transition between a child and a young woman, the child unabashedly announcing Natasha as her preferred name, but the woman slightly embarrassed at the ludicrousness of the source.
“So call yourself Natasha,” he announced.
“Oh, Dad, could I?”
“Sure,” he returned, but then added some small print to the concession. “
If
it’s okay with your mother.”
Katy’s face fell, but then broke into a humbled smile when she realized she had been duped.
He kissed her good night and then went into Tuck’s room. Saying good night to Tuck was somewhat less complicated. He found Tuck lying straight as a board on top of his sheet and carefully lining all of his toy cars and trucks up and down along the sides of his legs.
“Tuck, do you really want to sleep with those things?”
“Why not?” Tuck asked earnestly.
“Because if you roll over on them during the night they’re going to hurt.”
Tuck looked up and down at the metal cars, reassessing the matter. “Ohhh,” he said, frowning gravely. Carefully and methodically he took them one by one and parked them in rows on the table beside his bed. As he did so David noticed that he too seemed unusually distracted. Even after he had finished and David was pulling the covers up around him, Tuck continued to stare off into space, absentmindedly doing the itsy-bitsy-spider routine with his fingers, a gesture that always meant something was weighing heavily on his mind. “Tuck, is anything the matter?”
“Dad, do I have moxie?”
David smiled, remembering that Tuck had been present when he had used the word earlier that day. “Not quite yet, Tuck,” he said. “But I’m sure you will someday.”
“What is moxie?”
“It’s courage. But not just any type of courage. It’s like being brave enough to face anything. It has to grow in a person.”
Satisfied for the moment, all the tension left Tuck’s face and he suddenly looked very sleepy.
“Good night, Tuck,” David said, kissing him on the forehead.
“Good night, Dad.”
“I love you.”
“I love you too.”
When he finally retired to his own bedroom he found Melanie sitting up in bed and looking very disturbed about something. He sighed. It just wasn’t his evening.
“You’re not thinking of changing your name, or asking me if you have moxie, are you?” he asked.
She looked at him, perplexed. “What?”
“Oh, it’s nothing. You just look concerned about something.”
“It’s Ben,” she said. “Listen to him.”
David paused and realized he could still hear Ben whining about something downstairs.
“What do you think it is?” Melanie asked.
“Just the newness of the place. The new smells.”
“But he seems so troubled about something.”
“Honey,” David soothed, “we’re out in the country now. I don’t mean to frighten you, but there are lots of little animals around,
harmless
animals, but lots of little animals nonetheless. Ben’s just not used to their sounds and smells yet.”
“What kind of little animals?” she asked uneasily. “Oh, I don’t know... rabbits, foxes.”
“Will the foxes bite Ben?”
“I doubt it. I suspect they’re far more frightened of Ben than he is of them. They’ll keep their distance. They do, you know. Things like that can smell a dog.”
David decided that perhaps the best thing to do was shut Ben outside for the night. At least that way Ben would start to get more of a feel for the place, run around and urinate on trees and stuff, and do all those things that a dog does to feel more comfortable about its territory. He went downstairs and put Ben out, but was chagrined when Ben’s whining did not subside but turned into barking. He continued to howl mournfully, woefully, all night long.
The next morning when David entered the kitchen he was greeted by the smell of bacon frying. Melanie stood at the stove, cracking eggs into a second skillet, Katy sat at the table with a bowl half full of soggy cereal in front of her and reading a book, and Tuck was crouching on his haunches in front of Ben who was reclining in a corner.
“Good morning, everybody,” David greeted. “Morning,” Melanie and Katy intoned together. Tuck looked up at his father’s approach.
“Daddy, something’s wrong with Ben.”
Melanie turned around with an expression halfway between mystification and I told you so. “He won’t eat,” she explained.
David went over and crouched down beside his son and looked into Ben’s eyes. The retriever stared back at him wearily. In front of him was a bowl of his favorite food, untouched.
“Maybe he’s just not hungry,” David said.
“Oh, come on,” Melanie challenged. “You know him. He’s normally famished.”
“I’ll bet he’ll eat this,” David said, standing and taking one of the pieces of bacon that was draining on a paper towel next to the sink and then crouching down again and wafting it in front of Ben’s nose. Ben sniffed it once and then looked up at him sadly, emitting an exhausted and frustrated whine.
Tuck looked at his father worriedly.
“I’m sure it’s nothing. He’s just depressed over the move. Dogs get depressed over things like that, you know.”
Melanie gave him a skeptical glance.
“Okay, okay,” David conceded. “If he’s not better in a day or two we’ll take him to the vet.”
“Is he sick, Dad?” Tuck asked.
“I don’t think so, but if he is we’ll see that he gets better.”