A Three Dog Life (4 page)

If you were to look into our apartment in the late morning, or early afternoon, or toward suppertime, you might find us together sleeping. Of course a good rainy day is preferable, but even on sunny summer days, the dogs and I get into bed. Rosie dives under the quilt on my right, Harry on my left, and we jam ourselves together. After a little bit Harry starts to snore, Rosie rests her chin on my ankle, the blanket rises and falls with our breathing, and I feel only gratitude. We are doing something as necessary to our well-being as food or air or water. We are steeping ourselves, reassuring ourselves, renewing ourselves, three creatures of two species, finding comfort in the simple exchange of body warmth.

All spring I kept falling down. I tripped over roots, cobblestones, uneven pavement. I slid on horse chestnuts down hills, my feet entangled themselves in plastic rubbish, I slipped in mud. My new shoes were too big but they were Nikes and very cool, I had stolen them from my daughter. And although I hated these mishaps, I must admit that the split second when you realize you're going down (that moment that seems to last forever) is thrilling. Maybe at sixty some perverse part of me enjoys being out of control.

Now we're in the middle of a heat wave but my dogs must still go out and this morning I stumbled down the stone steps that lead into the park at 115th Street. It was a hundred degrees. I popped up unhurt, still hanging on to both leashes, and two nice men with a dog whose clipped fur felt like a fleece blanket and who was not as
I'd assumed a puppy but eleven years old (what do you feed her—I want to eat that) leapt to assist me, but I hadn't broken anything. The jitters came from not wearing the full complement of underwear de rigueur for a woman my age but it was so hot, and I just hadn't bothered, and since this was the way I wandered around in the 1960s, maybe I was taken back to those foolish and wild days of fled youth, which I have no desire to revisit.

The nice men and I finished talking about our dogs and as I proceeded into the park I spotted something peculiar in the thickety growth of a young tree. I extricated and examined what turned out to be a four-foot trident, wound round with red and green ribbon, and at the base, a Fuji apple sticker. I glanced around, perhaps the anonymous artist was waiting for his anonymous audience, but there was nobody anywhere. Rosie, who had been pointing, was ready to make her move and Harry was tugging stolidly in the opposite direction so I put the trident back and began to make my gingerly way downhill, acorns scattered like ball bearings all over the place. I stopped once to remove the chicken bone from Harry's mouth and again to comfort Rosie for not being allowed to actually catch the squirrel when every molecule in her quivering body was telling her how. On level ground the three of us were off again, Rosie hunting, Harry sniffing, and me looking for more things people have made.

There is an artist in Riverside Park, maybe a whole bunch of artists. Months ago I found a bunch of smooth round stones, like a clutch of eggs, tucked into the hollow at the base of a tree. Then there was a tiny place setting: knife, fork, spoon, all made of twigs—at the foot of a giant elm. On various tree stumps I've seen arrangements of stones and branches, like offerings on a makeshift altar. Leaning up against a tree near the huge boulder was a complex structure that formed either an unfinished shelter or half a spiderweb made of sticks. I marveled at it for some time, as it seemed to defy the laws of physics, and I wanted to take its picture but by the next morning it had been knocked down. This depressed me until I thought maybe it was the artist himself, dissatisfied with the way things were going. Yesterday a couple of feet off the path in the Bird Sanctuary were two sticks pushed into the ground about four inches apart, and balanced on top was a wavy twig. It made exactly the symbol for pi. Well, this is Columbia territory after all.

I keep an eye out for such things, although I don't talk about it much, aware of my reputation as an enthusiast. "Jennifer!" I exclaimed this summer in Scotland, pointing to a lovely bit of crimson in the grass ahead.
"That's a Kit Kat wrapper, Mom," she said patiently. And I don't want to sound like a lunatic. I once knew a woman who told me her house was haunted by a child who fashioned dolls out of string and lint and rags, and left them on the stairs for her to find. My hair stood on end. Thirty years later my hair still stands on end, except now I'm afraid she made the dolls herself. One evening last week after a heavy rain I saw a lump of material under a bush by the statue of Louis Kossuth at 113th Street. This turned out to be a shawl and on closer inspection to be my own shawl. It must have fallen from my shoulders one wet windy night and been blown into the bushes, and now sodden and muddy and half hidden, it looked like nothing so much as a clue from a crime scene.

You never know what you'll see. People have been sleeping in the park these past hot days, one of them a young man in a red-checked shirt who came into the dog run because he missed his own dog. He liked my beagle, Harry. It seems he had had his wallet stolen the day before and needed his bank card back, but he didn't want to talk about that, he wanted to talk about dogs. We chatted for a while; he was soft-spoken. The next day I came upon his body in the tall grass. He was, thank god, alive, and I hoped he wouldn't wake and see me see him there. The dogs and I hurried away.

But recently, when my spirits were low, and my foot was hurting from a fall with real broken bones, and I was missing my husband in a sudden fresh moment of grief, something new appeared, like a miracle. Balanced between the divided trunk of a fruit tree were a series of bone-thin sticks, like the widening strands of a delicate web, or the ribs of an unfinished boat, or an airy cradle, or a wind instrument, and nearby, another tree with the same almost invisible additions. I stopped dead in my tracks. Talk about wanting to cry out upon finding.

Of course there are the natural wonders too—the fallen branch with the head of a loon; the root that is exactly a frog, one amphibian forearm and tendril fingers grasping another root; the cobblestone caught up by a tree whose roots seem to have poured down its trunk like lava, and like lava hold the cobblestone lopsided forever. Often I see the small boy and his father who make the alphabet out of sticks on a sidewalk near the dog run; and the Tai Chi experts, like figures on a marvelous clock, who seem in their slow-motion way to be untelling time. There is the boy with a beautiful smile and strong body that I notice through the coffee shop window one Friday afternoon. The boy works for a scaffolding company and the crew is taking apart the structure that has been up so long I can't remember before. Dismantling is an art of its own, nothing is undone before its time. Piece by piece poles are unbolted and handed down, planks lifted and slid to the sidewalk. I love the young boy's pleasure in his own strength, flinging heavy steel rods on the back of the truck, grinning at his co-workers, all men more seasoned than he, and I sense their good-natured pleasure in him too. Maybe he's twenty, his whole life ahead. Imagine, I think, being twenty again, but I can't. The next time I look up, the trucks and crew are gone, the structure has vanished, and there are the spindly trees again, complete with leaves.

Rich was a birder, dyed in the wool; we have lists from his fourth-grade sightings in Central Park. He wrote with a dark pencil and he pressed down hard. Blue jay, house finch, crow ... Once in his twenties he sighted a Magnificent Frigate Bird off Jones Inlet, blown there by a hurricane. This was the proudest moment of his bird-watching life. On top of his dresser now are a bunch of birds, a small haphazard collection. There are the shorebirds, long-legged wading creatures; a bufflehead duck he made of clay in the seventh grade; two drab decoys we bought at an auction; a red plastic chicken (mine), which neatly lays three white eggs if you push down gently on her back; a papier-mâché crow, mascot of Old Crow, with his jaunty top hat, that I fell in love with because something in its expression reminded me of my father. There is also a little box of grain Rich saved from a cross-country trip he took when he was seventeen; he and a friend worked on farms along the way. It goes with the birds. What used to be on top of his dresser? A small tray for change, his wallet, scraps of paper with things to do, a picture of us taken at his brother's house a couple of weeks after we were married. A flashlight, just in case. A backup alarm clock, just in case. Rich was prepared for everything. He was a man who carried a couple of Band-Aids in his wallet and always had an extra handkerchief if somebody needed one. I've put a corn plant next to the bureau, green and leafy. They never die.

I go up to see my husband every Wednesday. My friend Ruth picks me up at eight so I get up at six in order to have the dogs walked and the paper read and the coffee drunk. It's a couple of hours north, depending on traffic, and we have become close friends over the last few months. Our destination is Kingston, and once there Ruth and I stop in Monkey Joe's, a coffee shop with fantastic cappuccino and great pumpkin muffins. We sit together for twenty minutes, then she goes to work at Benedictine Hospital and I head for the pay phone behind a Hot Wings joint that seems to be always on the verge of reopening, and call a cab to take me to the rehabilitation center where my husband has been for the past eleven months.

Sometimes when I arrive Rich is still asleep, his face relaxed, looking so like himself that I can't believe he won't wake up and be all better. Other times he is up, stalled in the middle of whatever he began to do, his back to the door, his arms raised like a conductor, motionless, as if he were playing some cosmic game of statue. Or maybe he sits on the bed, a pair of socks in one hand, his trousers laid out beside him. After our usual greeting, "Absie! How did you find me!" or "What time did you get up? I didn't hear you," he lapses back into silence. The nurses say he can stand in front of the bathroom mirror (made of shiny metal) for an hour or more, toothbrush in his hand. In brain injury jargon, perhaps this is what is meant by "difficulty completing a task."

The first time I heard this term I imagined a child who can't manage tying shoelaces, a grown-up who forgets how to scramble eggs, some kind of visible difficulty, frustration, something that could be relearned. I didn't know about the getting stuck. For my husband, there is no such thing as a minute ago, there is no
but we've been sitting here for an hour and a half.
That information has nowhere to lodge in Rich's consciousness. He has a collapsing past. If he doesn't remember, he doesn't believe. And if everything is now, what's the rush? I used to try and coax him, nudge him on (the TBI phrase is "redirect"), but that only made him angry and confused. So I have adapted. I join him. We sit and steep ourselves in 10:37, a single moment, while outside this room an hour disappears, bypassing us. I am always surprised when I look at the clock to find how long we've been there.

Once he's moving, I see how slowly he puts himself together. We select the clothes. "These aren't mine," he insists, but somehow we get past that. He puts his socks on the way he always did, rolling them back to get his toes in, unrolling them carefully over the rest of his foot, inch by inch, then pulling them over his heel. Next trousers, then shirt carefully buttoned, and everything tucked in neatly. Rich hasn't shaved in some time; instead he pulls his beard out hair by hair. This has a name but I forget what it is.

Last week he didn't smile or greet me. He wouldn't hold my hand. "What's wrong?" I asked, this was so unlike him. "We're divorced," he said, as if I were an imbecile. "We're married, Rich," I told him. "We've been married fourteen years. You're my husband," I said, touching his arm, "I'm your wife." He looked at me coldly. "Transparent windowlike words." He doesn't believe in his brain injury, so he has come up with an explanation for my absence: I have left him. "I'm alone," he says, waving his arm down the hall. "Hundreds of single beds," he says, "hundreds of single beds with old men lying in them with their boots on."

Time has gotten skewed, as tangled as fish line, what means what anymore? How could it be two years since the accident? I calculate it in months, weeks, but the numbers don't feel real or important. One hundred and four weeks. Twenty-four months. Whole handfuls of time have slipped through my fingers. Seasons rush by before I have grasped "winter," "spring." Somehow I have gotten to be sixty, in no time Rich will be seventy. We would have had parties to mark the place, but the last birthday slid by unnoticed, the last anniversary. Twenty-four months since the accident. If it were a child, it would be talking, walking, climbing into everything. "Time flaps on its mast," wrote Virginia Woolf in
Mrs. Dalloway.
For us time hangs off its mast. Sometimes I'm not even sure about the mast. Something stopped ticking April 24, 2000. Our years together ended, our future together changed. In one moment of startling clarity he told me, "My future has been dismantled." Last week he wouldn't look at me for an hour. "If I may navigate this already swollen stream of self-absorption," he said at last, "people borrow things without asking."

" What things?" I asked gratefully, and with that the subject had changed. We spent the rest of the afternoon looking at
The Sibley Guide to Birds,
which I'd bought him a year ago. We spent a long time with ducks, with woodpeckers and thrushes. He didn't recall having ever seen a Magnificent Frigate Bird and I didn't insist. Long-term memory is sometimes intact, but he'd forgotten that long-gone windy day on Long Island.

My friend Ruth, a bereavement counselor, tells me that most widows remember more vividly the last weeks of their husband's lives than the span of their lives together. I am not a widow, but my husband as he was is gone. I concentrate on who Rich is at any given moment and I lose sight of who he was, who we were. It takes my friend Denise to recall how when we had company at our house in Greenport, Rich went out early in the morning to buy several newspapers, bags of warm scones and croissants and muffins. I had forgotten, and remembering was painful. Rich used to make a mean omelet. On nights when I was cooked out and there was nothing much to eat, Rich fixed an omelet for himself. Did I want one, he always asked, and no thanks, I always said. But the look of it sliding out of the pan, perfect with that mottled brown, smelling of butter, sometimes a little lox thrown in at the last minute, weakened my resolve, and Rich would slide the better part of half onto a plate and urge me to eat. I remember how he used to wake me in Greenport with a cup of cappuccino from Aldo's. One weekend when our friends Sarah and Cornelius and Kathy were visiting we looked up the Magnificent Frigate Bird in the Audubon book and discovered that the male has a red pouch that he inflates to make himself attractive to the female, but it takes him thirty minutes to get it done. "Phoo phoo—be there in a minute, honey—phoo phoo!" We laughed ourselves sick at the kitchen table. How long ago was that? The only way to contain catastrophe is to cordon it off with dates, but the numbers mean nothing. If I think instead of how much dust would have settled on Rich's bureau, then I can feel it. There is nothing like dust.