A Three Dog Life (8 page)

This Thursday he was anxious. A new doctor had taken him off two of his medications—why do they mess with what works?—and when I went to pick him up he was agitated and miserable, he couldn't come with me, he had plans, there were things he had to do. I wondered if he thought he was back at work. For a couple of years after his accident, he would get desperate, believing he was supposed to be covering a news story he couldn't remember. "We can do everything in Woodstock," I said, but no, no, he had to stay, if he left now nothing would get done and he couldn't put it off any longer. He was sitting on the chair in his little room; a copy of the new
American Heritage Dictionary
I'd given him was on the bed. "Let's go," I said. "Sally is waiting with the baby," but to no effect. He stood up and felt in his pockets. "I'm looking for something and I don't know what it is. I won't even know it when I find it," he said.

How did I convince him to leave with me? A mix of cajoling and bullying. We got to the house, where Sally and Nora were waiting, and he was happy to see them as he always is. We ate our big sandwiches and Rich had a couple of chocolate chip cookies, his favorite, but he didn't want coffee, which was just as well since there was no milk.

"I've got to go," he said, getting up. "It's late." Sally and I looked at each other. We were only an hour into a lovely afternoon. Nora was eating Cheerios in her playpen, the dogs were sleeping in the sun, but Rich was headed for the door, determined to leave. All business.

There was a new notebook on the counter. I'd bought it because of the color—a wonderful red, and for the green planets on its cover. I handed this to Rich, found a pen, and coaxed him back to the chair. "Here," I said, "you can get organized. Write all the things you need to do." He sat back down and leaning the notebook against his knee he began immediately to write. He looked like a reporter again. Was he thinking about camera crews and soundmen? Was he laying out procedures? The longer he wrote the more curious I got and finally I stood behind the chair and looked over his shoulder.

"Corn for corn soup. Lettuce, cucumber for salad, along with tomatoes and some cheddar cheese. Kaliber and orange juice. Milk too. Apple juice too. Thicken sliced sandwich bread. Tuna fish, sardines, onions, ham, sardines. Crackers for the cheese."

Here is how I get my husband in the car: I lie. "I'm going to buy us something for dinner. Will you come with me?"

This rainy October afternoon I stick a fake log in the fireplace and light it and we spend what Rich used to call the shank of the day in each other's company, dozing and waking to firelight. It is like being married again. But he can't stay. Sooner or later I have to get up from my chair and disturb him. I have to touch his arm, speak in his ear, jostle him. I have to coax him out of his warm chair and into the car so I can drive him back. "I'm going to get us something for dinner. Will you come with me?" This is what I hate: that he nods so willingly and gets to his feet. That it works every time.

The dogs allow themselves to be corralled in the living room and Rich and I go slowly down the back steps, my arm under his left arm, his right hand on the banister. I am carrying a box of cookies and once he has gotten into the passenger seat and I've stretched the seat belt and he has buckled it, I give them over. "Chocolate chippers! I might have to have one," he says, opening the box. We are headed back to the Northeast Center for Special Care. I am trying not to feel anything. Now that we are on our way, I want to get it over with. I want to get him there and safely up to his room, then I want to leave as fast as I can. "Are we going to two markets?" Rich asks and I nod. But we drive past the Black Bear Deli and the Hurley Ridge Market without him noticing. We drive down Route 28, we pass the K&R Car Wash, and the single-story pink building that houses Catskill Mountain Organic Coffee, which roasts its own beans, we pass Thomas's Pest Control (Got Mice? Not Nice!) and take the turn for Route 209 North, and I hold my breath waiting to see if this time he will latch on to the fact that I am betraying him. Out of the corner of my eye I can see his hands around the container of cookies on his lap. I am trying not to feel anything.

"It's been a lovely three days," says Rich, and I know he thinks we're on vacation. "What are our plans?" he asks. "Are we looking for a motel?" He is happy. I remember vacations. We were good companions. I remember the island of Nevis, where little birds ate sugar out of the bowls on our breakfast table. Rich took long runs down the beach and I read
Howards End,
inexplicably bursting into tears at the end. We had lobster salad sandwiches and fell in love with pelicans and wondered what living there all the time would be like.

When we get to the nursing home Rich wants to leave the cookies in the car.

"How will they know these are ours?" he asks. " They will think we are stealing."

"I will tell them as soon as we go in," I say, and grab the box over his protests and hold his arm, steering us through the parking lot. I smile at the man who opens the sliding glass doors, and Rich's electronic bracelet sets off the alarm briefly. "Hello, Mr. Rogin," he says. "Did you have a nice day?" but Rich is hard of hearing. We make our way to the elevator.

"What button should I push?" he asks.

"Two," I say.

How do I live with myself?

Some of the residents are in the big dining room watching a movie with Goldie Hawn, but I bring Rich to his room, where I tell myself he will be comfortable. His single bed is neatly made, some of his clothes are folded on top—underwear, two sweatshirts. I gesture toward the chair. "Why don't you sit down for a minute," I suggest. "I will be back soon. I'm going to run a couple of errands." I try not to register his bewildered expression. "I will be back soon."

I notice the plants need watering but I'll do it next time.

"But what do we want?" my husband asks. He is distressed, and I realize that I am in his room at the nursing home with one foot out the door, but he is in the supermarket.

"Milk," I say.

"Just milk?" He seems dubious.

"Just milk."

"How much milk?"

"Half a gallon," I say, pushing the box of cookies into his hands. I know in five minutes he'll forget I was there at all. I kiss him. Then I'm gone.

Once I stood in line behind a young woman ordering coffee who remarked to her friend that she didn't yet have a set of beliefs, and I imagined catalogs from which one could order such sets, like furniture, beliefs that wouldn't collapse under one's full weight, big sturdy reliable sideboards of belief. As for me, I have learned what I can do and what I can't. I know my limits. That's all I have to go on, but it's better than nothing.

It's a rainy night in 1987 and I'm coming out of the West Side Market with a pint of heavy cream and two boxes of strawberries. My fourteen-year-old daughter and I have been eating strawberry shortcake for almost two weeks now. "It's fruit," I tell myself, "vitamin C," as I maniacally roll out the biscuit dough night after night. Anyway, this particular night there is Crystal, only I don't know her yet. I notice a tall woman wearing an army jacket several sizes too big. She isn't saying anything; you really don't need to if you're standing on the sidewalk with a bunch of kids and a big pregnant belly and you're holding your right hand out, palm up. A little boy stands behind her, his face buried in her jacket. I think of my grandsons and I'm having one of those shocks you get, here is someone I'm meant to know, and I scrounge around in my pockets and ask if there's anything else she needs. "I don't have much money but I've got lots of stuff," I say. "Do you need anything else?" She smiles. She has a beautiful calm face. "Thank you," she says in a soft voice, and she shows her kids the twenty I have just thrust in her palm.

"Plates," she says, turning back to me. "We have a place to live but we don't have plates."

Well, I've got plates and I go home and pack some up in a box along with forks and spoons and knives and some extra mugs. I add a huge jar of honey and carry the box back to where they are still standing. I insist on giving her cab fare and she and the kids pile into the car and go home with booty. For the next month I run into Crystal maybe once a week, usually outside the market, and for some reason, we really hit it off. Sometimes we go have coffee at Happy Burger and talk about music or fled youth; we compare women with children to women without and agree they don't speak our language. Then she gives birth and I don't see her for a while. A few months later she is outside the West Side Market with Jeremiah and Goldie, and we all have lunch together in Happy Burger, and I try not to notice that both kids smell of urine, and that this four-year-old boy has never learned to talk. Crystal and I sit with our elbows on the table and we talk about childbirth and laugh about men. I love her resilience, her optimism, her sense of humor. The hardest part about asking for money, she says, is that it is embarrassing. I want to know what she has learned about human nature. "People don't stop when it's raining," she says, with a laugh. One night we go see
Predator
together, both of us love Arnold, and after the cab drops her off the driver asks, "Is she your maid?" and I say, "No," righteously, "she is my friend."

But it isn't true. There is a dividing line. I am careful with Crystal to say only what I mean, not to exaggerate. Her life scares me. There have been injuries to her children, the eldest in particular, her arm broken in some disciplinary action taken about an open window. "It wasn't Ray's fault," says Crystal, "it was an accident," and I look at the girl who says nothing, stares at the table. Crystal has another family of grown children in Florida, but she mentions their existence only once, and she hasn't seen them in twelve years. Her husband used to smoke crack, she finally tells me, but he's clean now.

Then one day there is Crystal and all eight kids—she has eight now, the pregnancy was twins—waiting for me outside my work. The children look tired and grimy. Crystal is nervous. She is perspiring. "I told them to be quiet and to put on all their underwear this morning," she says. "I decided on the spur of the moment." Ray is smoking crack, and she isn't going to go through that again. She is taking the children and going tomorrow to Tuskegee, where she has heard they are good to strangers. They've been all day at a park far from their neighborhood, and they need a place to sleep. The bus leaves in the morning. Can they stay at my apartment?

"Of course," I say.

Catherine isn't pleased, these are the kids who ate her special Italian lollipop, the one she had been saving for two years; it had a design inside like a flower. She isn't happy, but she knows there is no choice. "What can I say, Mom? No, you can't stay here with your kids, you have to sleep on a bench?" They arrive, we order pizza, everyone is fed, and the kids run around. It's as if my apartment is full of little wildfires, and I can't put them all out, the floor is burning. Finally I tell Crystal that Catherine and I are going to the movies. Crystal is going through a bag of children's clothes that my eldest daughter has given me for her. "Have a good time," she says, smiling.

"Maybe when we get back they'll all be asleep," I say to my daughter.

"But, Ma, it's like
we
don't have a home," Catherine says as we walk downtown to the Olympia. When we return the children are sleeping. They are everywhere, draped over the arms of chairs, the back of the sofa, under the coffee table, on the rug, on the bare floor. They look like little birds who have been shot out of the sky, all lying where they fell. Crystal is asleep in the rocker and Catherine and I tiptoe past, and I ask if Catherine wants to come in my bed and she does, and neither of us sleep. "What if they don't leave?" she whispers, but I am already afraid of that.

Crystal moves slowly the next morning. Socks are carefully chosen from those sorted out of the bag, shoes are tied carefully; everyone wears something new, everyone has their hair brushed, everyone washes their face and brushes their teeth. I stand around mentally wringing my hands, sneaking peeks at the clock. What if they miss the bus? What if she asks to stay longer? Whatever this is a test of, I'm not passing it. Finally they are ready to set off. Crystal carries a suitcase I give her that contains the rest of the hand-me-down clothes from my daughter's family.

"I was afraid you'd miss the bus," I say, hoping I don't sound relieved. They have fifty-five minutes to get to Port Authority.

"I didn't want to rush them," she says. "I wanted this to seem like a normal day." I have made sandwiches for the trip, peanut butter and jelly, and the eldest girl takes that shopping bag murmuring thanks.

We say good-bye, embrace, Crystal says she'll call. She is grateful and I don't deserve gratitude. Here is this brave woman taking eight kids to a strange city where she knows no one, and all I can think of is please don't ask me for something I can't give. Part of me fears I will see them all tomorrow, outside the West Side Market again. But several nights later she telephones from Alabama; they have arrived safely, they have somewhere to stay, and Crystal already has a job working in a cafeteria.

For a long time afterward, I was afraid when the telephone rang. I was afraid when the downstairs buzzer sounded. I was equally afraid of seeing her again, and of never seeing her again. But my center would not hold, and I knew it, and I was most terribly afraid of who I would become when I said No.

It is 2003. A new social worker greets me as I walk down the hall of the neurobehavioral unit of the Northeast Center for Special Care. This is the locked ward; residents here all suffer serious behavioral problems brought on by brain injury. "Poor impulse control" is the euphemism. The young woman introduces herself, and I say I am here to visit my husband. Who is your husband? she asks. I tell her.

" Well," she chirps, much too cheerily, "we'll start work on getting Rich home."

My husband was hit by a car three years ago. He sustained traumatic brain injuries. Most of the recovery in traumatic brain injury occurs during the first year. Does this person know my husband? Does she know anything?