Pug Hill (2 page)

“Thanks,” I say without looking up and reach for the phone. As I do so, it occurs to me that Dad, even more than anyone else, doesn’t ever call me at work. Dad thinks talking on the phone while at the workplace is slacking. Though I don’t think he uses that actual word, Dad doesn’t approve of slacking and does not wish to be an accessory to it.

“Hi, Dad,” I say, worried now, wondering if maybe Dad is breaking his rule of never calling because something is wrong.

“Hi, Hope, how are you?” he says, very much not like anything at all is wrong. Dad’s voice is calm and clear and assured, as it almost always is. For as long as I can remember, I have always felt so assured from just the sound of Dad’s voice.

“I’m good. Is everything okay?” I ask just to be sure there isn’t actually something wrong and I have just been lulled into a false complacency by the very soothing and comforting nature of my dad’s voice “Oh, everything’s fine,” he says, “I’m not disturbing you at work, am I?” I tell him, no, not at all.

“Well, good then, I’m calling because I have some exciting news and wanted to talk to you about it right away.” I wonder if this exciting news has something to do with my older sister, Darcy. In my family, a lot of things have to do with Darcy. I try my best to push the thought from my mind.

“Sure, what’s up?”

“Well, Mom and I have decided to have a party for our fortieth wedding anniversary. May seventh is a Saturday this year; we’ll have it right on the actual date,” he tells me happily.

“That’s great,” I say, and I think to myself, not for the first time,
Wow, forty years.

“Oh, yes, we’re already really looking forward to it. Mom’s already all caught up in the planning. You know how she loves a project.”

Oh, I know,
I think,
believe me, I know.
“Yes,” I say in lieu of anything that could be construed as hostile.

“Well, Hope,” he says and pauses for a moment, “Mom and I were thinking how nice it would be if, at the party, you made a speech.”

I say nothing. I stare blankly ahead of me as the word
speech
scrapes through my brain like nails on a chalkboard.

Well, Hope,
I think to myself, because suddenly all I want in the world is to go back to the part of the conversation where Dad hadn’t said anything about a speech, where he’d only said,
Well, Hope.
I want to go back to
Well, Hope
and have something, anything, even something about Darcy come after it.

“I’m sorry?” I say in a last-ditch effort to allow myself to think that I didn’t hear what I thought I just heard, a last-ditch effort to delude myself into believing that this couldn’t really be happening. But, sadly, tragically even, Dad simply says the same thing again.

“Mom and I were thinking how nice it would be for you to make a speech at the party.”

He says it happily, in anticipation, it seems, of all the niceness that will surely be my speech. He says it all just like it’s any other sentence, any other perfectly harmless sentence. He says it all as if what he’s just said won’t, in its own quiet way, kill me.

“A speech?” I ask and the words don’t sound like nails on a chalkboard anymore, now they sound very much like the first two bars of the theme song from
Jaws.

My heart has stopped beating. I put my hand to my chest. “A speech, yes,” he says it yet again. I listen to the
duh-duh!
getting louder and louder in the background.

I sit frozen, phone in hand, and along with the music, I listen to this voice in my head: it’s listening to the
Jaws
music, too, and it’s shouting at me, quite loudly, “Get your drunk, naked ass out of the ocean, you are about to be eaten alive by a motherfucking GREAT WHITE SHARK!”

And then, there is another voice in my head, one that apparently isn’t listening to the music. This one speaks calmly, softly. It says to me, “Look, so you’ve had this one thing, public speaking, that has scared you more than anything else for your entire life. So it’s your Great White Shark, so it’s your BIG SCARY THING, it’s also your parents’ fortieth wedding anniversary.” The voice pauses for a moment, maybe just to be sure that what it has said has sunk in, and then continues, “You love your parents and your dad has asked this important favor of you, and really,” the voice asks me,
“who
says no to such a request?”

“Really,” it says again,
“who?”

I think for a minute that maybe I do, that maybe
I
am the person who says no to such a request.

The shark is approaching, faster and faster, bigger and bigger, but somehow, I manage to think how saying no would be so ungrateful, so flippant, and so disrespectful of forty years of marriage. Saying no seems kind of hostile and churlish and as right as I want it to be, I know it would be wrong.

“I’d love to, Dad,” I say, and wonder how much time has actually passed.

Dad says, “Wonderful.”

Somehow I refrain from explaining to him that this is all pretty damn far away from wonderful. Instead, I say, “Great,” and then I say, “okay.”

The okay, I know, is more to calm myself than for any other reason.

“Great.”

There is no more
Jaws
music. The voices in my head, the frantic one, along with the calm, cool, and collected one, have both fallen silent. I listen, helpless, hopeless, alone, as Dad says, “Okay, then, back to work. Love you, Hope. Talk to you soon.”

“Love you, too, Dad. Bye,” I say, and put down the phone. My heart has started beating, though I wonder if it will ever beat in quite the same way again.

I stare blankly at my computer screen. I try to think how long I’ve been trying to prevent this from happening. Ever since Mr. Brogrann’s tenth grade English class, and the disaster that was my oral report on
The Grapes of Wrath,
I’ve been petrified, horrified really, of even just the
thought
of public speaking. Since then, I’ve taken great pains to avoid any sort of public speaking; in fact many decisions in my life, it could be said, have been predicated on keeping this fear at bay. It may seem like a lot, like too much really has stemmed from that day in tenth grade English that began with my freezing in front of the class and ended some horrible twenty minutes later with my throwing up, locked safely in a bathroom stall. But that’s how it happened.

The waves of repercussion from that ill-fated speech, they started right away. In eleventh grade, I dropped Advanced Placement Topics in European History as soon as I saw the soul-shattering words,
forty-minute final presentation,
on the last page of the syllabus. And pretty much, it all just snowballed from there. To tell you the truth, at this point, it’s a pretty big snowball. That I work in Paintings Conservation is not exactly a coincidence. Yes, it is the result not only of a lot of training and study and genuine, real interest on my part, but it is also quite closely related to the fact that early on in college I realized how much time an Art History student spent sitting quietly in a darkened room, watching slide shows.

A professor told me once, in a way I believe was meant to deter me, that an MFA in Paintings Conservation was not all hands-on practical application, but actually entailed quite a lot of research, quite a lot of sitting in libraries, chasing down footnotes. It sounded to me at the time very much like an earthly heaven.

One decision slyly led to the next, not unlike the way sand will bury your feet and then your ankles if you stand at the beach, a little ways back from where the waves break. But that might not be the best analogy, because with the sand it’s different. With the sand there’s something reassuring in knowing that you can walk away, in knowing that you won’t actually be buried alive.

The farther away I got from that oral report in Mr. Brogrann’s class, the more determined I was to make sure I never went back. And as the years went on, I felt more and more sure I never would. I made it through high school, college, and graduate school. I had a job as a paintings restorer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a very good job that I actually loved, and that would never require me to make a speech. I’d been a bridesmaid a few times, but all those brides had sisters so I’d never been a maid of honor, a speech-making danger zone if ever there was one. And then, at last, I’d believed that I was safe. I’d somehow managed to lull myself into complacency; I became so certain it would never come up again, that I’d almost forgotten all about it. Until today. Today, regardless of everything I have done over the years to keep this fear at bay, here it is, leering at me like a scary birthday party clown.

The IM symbol, the little yellow man with the blue triangle, starts jumping, up and down, at the bottom of my computer screen. I reach for my mouse and click on the bouncing yellow man. An IM window pops up on my screen.

 

I quit out of IM without answering. Then I do the only thing I can think of, the only thing I can think of that makes any sense. I leave.

I leave my desk, I leave the museum, I leave Elliot. As soon as I’m outside, I feel guilty for leaving work so abruptly. I worry that maybe I should have said something, that maybe I should consider going back. But I can’t. I walk quickly, south for a while, down Fifth. It’s not as crowded now, in the late afternoon. I’m sweating, but not because it’s hot outside; though it is warm out for February, “warm for February,” in my mind, is just not that warm. I think how maybe the sweat is really just fear, just trying to get out of my body any way it can. I welcome it, I walk faster; it makes me feel a little less like I’m about to die.

At Seventy-sixth Street, I turn right and walk into the park. I see the
Alice in Wonderland
sculpture, the one with the mushroom and Alice and the Mad Hatter and the rabbit. I remember how for so long I thought the story was about someone named Allison Wonderland, and how even after I knew that it wasn’t, I always thought it should be. I always thought it made so much more sense that way.

I turn left and step over a low wrought-iron fence. I stand for a full minute, just over the fence, and listen to my breathing as it slows down. Slowly, I walk up Pug Hill through the wet leaves; Central Park is so quiet and I think it smells so much like mulch.

I don’t know why I think mulch because I don’t know if I’ve ever smelled mulch before. In fact, I’m pretty sure I haven’t. As I walk, I look down at my feet, at my Ugg boots, and I feel a twinge of disappointment, not because they’re already out of style, but because I’ve gotten water spots on them from walking through the wet leaves. I’m struck by that not completely unfamiliar feeling, that feeling like maybe I’m about to cry. And I know it’s not the dark marks all over the shearling boots that make me feel like I want to cry, but The Speech, the Great White Shark, the BIG SCARY THING.

I get to the top of the hill and I sit down on one of the benches that I sit on when it’s too cold or too wet to sit on the grass by the pine tree. The grass by the pine tree is better. There, you get so many more of the renegade pugs, the ones who will break away from the group and run toward you, panting hard, running as fast as they can in their little harnesses—purple, and green, and pink, and even once I saw a zebra-striped harness on a beautiful black pug. There, by the tree, you get the pugs who’ll stop to sit with you for a moment, tongues out, heads bobbing, looking up at you and then in the same direction as you, back at all their pug compatriots.

It isn’t until I’ve been sitting for a moment that the silence I was thinking about before, right before the mulch, hits me.

There is no snorting. No panting. No “Jasper!” No “Fresa!” No “Derby, Roxy, Buster, Vince, come here!”

No pugs. Not even one. I lean back against the bench, hoping it might help me not sink under the heavy weight that is the gravity of the situation. I close my eyes.

Not today,
I think.
Today is not the day I want to learn that there aren’t always pugs at Pug Hill.
I don’t want this knowledge. What I want is to go back in time; back to before there was a speech, back to when I lived in a world where the pugs would be here any instant I needed them. I guess I’ve just never thought about it before. I guess they just come here on the weekends. I count back in my head: nine years. Nine years I’ve lived in New York and I don’t think I’ve ever been in Central Park during the week.

I close my eyes. I try not to think about the speech. Because the speech, you see, it’s too big of a problem. I try to think about other things. Sometimes I’ve found that when you are faced with what seems like an unsolvable problem, it helps to take stock of the other problems in your life. I’ve found that if you look at the other problems, ones that are maybe, possibly, if you
really
put your mind to it, solvable, you’ll feel a little bit better about the problem you can’t ever imagine solving. While not necessarily the most cheering of pursuits, it does take your mind off the unsolvable problem for a little while.

Okay. I mean, it’s not like I woke up this morning and felt very much like a light, carefree person, like a person who wanted to lie on her back and kick her feet in the air with delight. It’s not like I woke up this morning feeling like a person without some problems that needed solving. Lately, to be truthful, there have been a few.

There’s my boyfriend, Evan, for starters. I don’t think it’s working out with Evan. I have been trying to ignore this fact. I have been trying to believe that we are just going through a bad phase, but the more I tell myself that, the more I suspect it isn’t really true. I try to remember the way I felt when I first met him, when he called me after our first date and said to my voice mail, “I’m having a drink with some friends, but the only thing I want to do in the world right now is have another drink with you.” I try to remember how, when he said that, I just melted. I try to remember how I felt like maybe all the less-than-stellar boyfriends who had happened before him had happened so I’d meet Evan right at the right time, right when I was ready, so that everything might be a little bit perfect. But lately, the more I try to remember all that, the less I can. And mostly, the more I try to think that maybe he really is the one, the more it’s just so completely clear that he isn’t. There’s that.