The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals (20 page)

We called her Amelia Earhart, Amelia for short, although looking back now I cannot recall the reason for the name. What I can recall is how much she changed my stay with that family, how impressed I was by her seemingly immediate adaptation to her new circumstances, how she attached to me so easily and then found the fridge, learning to open it with her agile paws, pulling out bunches of dark grapes and blocks of wrapped cheese. Unlike me, Amelia would eat anything and, taking my cues from her, I began to do the same, one warm night mixing my meat with my milk, another night sucking the mussel straight from its peeling shell, so who was following who here, and did it really matter? I loved to pat her backwards, the flat fur bunching up into bristles and then smoothed into sleekness again. Her gold mask was always spiky to the touch but her paws were soft, split into four velvety segments, it seemed they worked better than human hands, tossing small balls, closing round your thumb with a pulsing dexterity.

The summer stayed hot. Amelia, however, was always on the move, couldn’t be caged, rarely seemed to sleep, her sounds making their way into my dreaming, my night-mind now full of impossible animals: humans with tails, fish with feet. Occasionally I’d startle awake to find her hunched at the end of my bed, looking straight at me, something so insistent in her gaze one could almost think she was trying to pass me a message. Sometimes, unable to fall back asleep, I’d toss aside my single sweaty sheet and, with Amelia next to me, I learned my new nocturnal neighborhood, the houses doused in darkness as we walked here and there, back and forth, setting our stamp in soil, leaving behind us a trail of where we had been, proof I’d done my discovery.

We’d return at dawn or well before, slipping into a silent house, her fur wet with dew. Any insomnia we both had was cured by these long dark walks, or perhaps her nature was incontrovertible and, despite living with humans, she could only sleep when the sun came up. From almost the first second she became mine I wondered what of her I could change and what would stay the same. How far could a being bend and at what point did a flex become broken? I was still a child and thus I believed, somewhere inside, that she had these questions too, because I thought I saw them in her intelligent eyes that inched down slowly as light filled my room and she dreamt like a dog, her paws paddling while she chased invisible prey. She slept each morning away and, as if propelled by an invisible clock, reliably woke by four, stretching responsibly as though she’d taken a course on the importance of it all, taking care to bend each limb before finally finding her feet. We fed her fish or meats from a can and once she was done we’d venture forth a second time, her urge to explore becoming mine, or could it possibly have been my heretofore hidden urge hers, but either way, both by day and by night, my new neighborhood now revealed itself to me as, with the help of a six-pound mammal, I made the grids and crossroads my own.

Even today, thirty some odd years later, I recall the names of those streets I found with Amelia, perhaps because of Amelia, but I recall more what it was like to learn them—Oakvale Road, where the Carneys lived, and Dale Way, where almost every house had an above-ground swimming pool hidden by high fencing. I recall telling Annie with a studied sort of nonchalance, “Oh, I was up on Dale Way today,” as though this were a major accomplishment. Maybe it was. That girl back then and this woman now—both hated and hate change, preferring to cling to the creaky rather than to stretch into space.

I don’t know what drew so many to us when we walked. Or perhaps I do. People like to watch the wild, but we like it even more when nature and culture collide. There I was, a fully formed human, my tongue trained for language, my hands for napkins and knives. And there Amelia was, at my heels or perched upon my shoulder, an animal pulled from a parallel universe and living proof that two separate spheres could happily intersect. Back then, as now, I had a fascination with cosmology, and I remember I was reading a book about how, after the big bang, not one universe but billions formed side by side like bubbles sitting on a string. According to that book’s author we were living in a vast world right next to neighbors in a dimension we simply couldn’t see, and so it was the same for our neighbors, blind to the existences on either side of them, and yet still somehow we sense them. We try to imagine our way into ants and aliens and come up struck by the barrier called skin.

That small plain raccoon had none of the grandeur of grand questions even as the fact of her following me tickled people pink because it suggested, I think, proof of what was possible, down here, up there, and all around. And thus, when people saw us exploring the streets, parading up and down, Amelia’s tail atwitch, as curious as we were proud—for, Look what we had found! Look what we had formed!—everyone came running out of their houses, hurrying down their walks, old women holding curlers in their hair, mothers with mixing bowls, men, their tails untucked. “What have you here? What animal is that?” they all wanted to know. The children surged forward, held back by nannies while Amelia chattered deeply, luxuriantly, standing high on her hind feet and turning in showy circles. Except for the immediate neighbors, no one knew where I came from and no one cared to ask; the final point perhaps was this: cosmology aside, I went from being an invisible person to “The Girl with the Raccoon,” and by midsummer it seemed everyone in my new town had heard of me. I was practically popular.

One day, out walking, I came to a squat house on the edge of town, down by the railroad tracks where the hip-high grasses were. Bindweed grew wild here, great white wheels of it strewn everywhere through the field, the long stems tangling at my feet. I picked armloads of the flowers, feeling their fleshiness and admiring their centers, the tiny pistils packed with pollen.

I didn’t see the man, at first. I wasn’t sure if I was walking on his property, although I thought not for he had a tidy lawn that ended abruptly where the tangle of flowers began, the two separated by a clear seam.

The man was standing on the small porch of the small house painted a dark green or maybe a grey. He was smoking a cigarette but flicked it away after only a moment or two. “You live around here?” he asked, one eye on me and the other on Amelia who was sitting on my shoulder, preening. The man had silver hair combed in a side part, and he scowled at Amelia, unimpressed with her presence.

“Birch Street,” I said. “321.”

“321 Birch Street?” the man said, tilting his head in thought. “Isn’t that where Cranston and Annie Trevor live?”

“That’s right,” I said.

The man stared at me. “You’re not one of theirs,” he said. “Are you?”

“Yes,” I said, and then, confused I added, “I mean no.”

The man raised one eyebrow and then slowly, his stare still solidly on me, he reached into his shirt pocket and slid out a second cigarette, placing it between his lips before snapping a match into flame.

“Yes and no?” he repeated, and then said nothing, letting the silence amplify the absurdity of my answer.

“I mean,” I said, but in fact I didn’t know what I meant, or how to explain what it was to be both in and out of a family, to belong but on the cusp. The man opened his mouth and smoke emptied into the air. It was like my systems shut down. All I could do was shrug.

“Linda,” the man called, still staring straight at me. “Hey, Linda. We’ve got a girl with a raccoon out here.”

Linda—she must have been his wife—came to the door, wiping her hands on a washcloth. “Good god,” she said.

“Name’s Amelia,” I said.

“Your name is Amelia,” the woman asked, “or is that what you call your raccoon?”

“Raccoon,” I said. “I call the raccoon Amelia.” As if on cue Amelia scuttled down my arm and leapt to the ground.

“And your name is?” Linda asked.

“Lauren,” I said, and then added after a beat, “Slater.”

“Lauren Slater here is telling me that she’s living with Annie and Cranston and their bunch up on Birch Street,” the man said, and then he scratched the bald dome of his head as though this were the most confusing thing in the world.

The woman peered at me over the porch railing, and then, suddenly, a soft smile. “You must be their new au pair,” she said. She turned to her husband. “Annie Trevor told me not even a year ago, when we ran into each other at DeMoulas, how she was thinking of bringing in a girl from overseas.”

And then suddenly it all came clear, how to tell this story. “That’s right,” I said, and I smiled up at the couple. “I’m from Ireland. I came to see your country.”

The man looked visibly relieved. He pulled on his cigarette and said, “I’d offer you one, but here in our country we have laws about that.”

“Not a problem,” I said and then, suddenly, the man said, leaning forward, his voice dropping down, half whisper, half hiss: “You know, you don’t have much of an accent for a girl from Ireland.”

“American schools,” I said, thinking quickly. “My parents sent us kids.”

The man rocked back in his heels and I could practically hear him chewing on what I said, trying to decide whether to believe me or—

“You from the city,” he said, “or are you—”

“Country,” I said, before he could finish his sentence. Suddenly I was filled with exhilaration. Whatever I said I saw, emerald fields dotted with bright red barns, gold cubes of hay stacked in the sunlight, laundry on a line, the wind perfect. “At the base of some of the biggest mountains around,” I added, and then there were mountains too, rumpled across the skyline, their tops lost in mist, mine. I told them how in my homeland I walked in forests with huge fronds, berries bright against stalks. And as I talked I learned, right then and there, the freedoms I could claim. Cut loose from a clear category, I could construct my own—at least it seemed that way to me—even as I felt my world warble the way it does when living a lie, no matter how swift or small. “We had horses,” I said, my voice suddenly small, the reversal rapid, all my gladness gone, the flowers flabby in my arms.

“Horses,” the man said. He looked entranced now, the woman askance. “That’s quite something,” she said, “living out there in the fields and forests like that. I imagine this here must all seem incredibly tame to you.”

I looked around me. Trash blew in the breeze. The railroad tresses were rotted, the tracks bars of black. All of a sudden I was seized with a panic it took me a second to make sense of. Amelia was gone, had wandered off while I talked, the grasses behind me so high all I could see were their feathered tips. “Amelia Airheart!” I called, and then I waited for her sound in the stalks, nothing. “Amelia,” I called again, my hands cupped around my mouth, a sick feeling inside me. “I’ve gotta go,” I said, and even though not much more than a second had passed I’d already cemented my lie to her loss, which meant she wouldn’t be back. When I finally found her at the fringe of the field, chewing on a stick, I grabbed hold of her fur—hard.

In real life, the Trevors lived in a town in southern Maine, on a semi-busy street, in that old, old rambling house set on a grassy plot with two one-hundred-year-old fruit trees that flowered first and then bore peaches so soft that they bruised before falling from the branches. Bees feasted on the rotting pulp. In the evenings, once the bees were gone, I followed Amelia to the trees and watched her eat the goop left on the ground while I wandered around, picking up peach stones and studying their surfaces with my thumb. Cut free from my family of origin and a home gone gothic with dread, those peach pits interested me simply because I could see them.

And I saw other things as well, as though my actual eyes were changing, my vision, trained for terror, for trauma, for large sweeping scales, now narrowing in on plain everyday objects and experiences previously hidden from me. The peach pits. Dust furred on the rim of a cup. The pleasures of picnicking, which Amelia introduced me to, down by a pond stocked with carp. Annie provided us with the basket, but I’d insist on packing it, slowly sifting through their cupboards, holding up the glass woman full of salt and the glass man full of pepper, sniffing the cinnamon stored in a perforated tin. In my mother’s home we weren’t allowed to loll about in the pantry, so this too was new for me, and strange, and strangely delightful, canned cherries floating in fluid—
May I have one? Help yourself
—Annie watching as I, raccoon-like, fished about with my fingers, pulling two up by their black stems, dropping my head back and popping them in my mouth. I found the nutmeg, the dried packets of milk, the caramel sauces, and split peas packed in air-tight canisters that made a sucking sound when I opened them. Their fridge yielded up bibbed lettuce, tomatoes on the vine, wedges of chocolate cake, and wheels of cheese coated in a thick white wax. Piece by piece I’d decide what to bring, usually mozzarella—a favorite of Amelia’s—plus enormous quantities of grapes, the fat purple kind, with juice as dark as iodine inside.

Basket packed, we’d walk off into the woods, laying a towel down by the pond, Amelia immediately crouching at its edge, ready to fish for her supper. Although the pond was stocked she always waited a good long time, looking, I assumed, for the perfect catch, while I lay there watching the sun cross the sky. Something uncoiled in me in those woods with Amelia, something long held hard and tight, a plaque of protection; I lay it down for a while and learned what life was like lived at a slower, lower level. I thought of Amelia fishing, or the Trevors all reading around a table at night, or Cranston polishing his antique pots, patient and quiet, the rag dark with dirt as he worked sometimes for hours in pursuit of something small. I still missed that high-stakes, home-grown fright; I’d be lying to say otherwise. But by poking a hole in the Trevors’ wall, it seemed I’d opened up a separate space inside of me as well, a space I could sense, and almost see, like a cupboard waiting within me, and inside that cupboard: A cane. A comb. A stone. Sometimes I’d open the cupboard door to find an old woman sewing; other times I’d see grass that went back and back and dim in the distance a piebald pony grazing. I never knew what I’d find in there, or why; it’s only now, years and years later that I see what united these objects was their quotidian character, the plain and quiet kind of plenty you miss when walking on a wire.