The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals (3 page)

Thirty, forty feet into the private way was a small pond, the clear water the color of deeply steeped tea, surrounded by cattails and gracile grasses. I lay on my belly on the moist bank and watched the watery world beneath me. Frogs, I noticed, uncurled their long tongues to which flies got stuck, and then swallowed. These amphibian animals lay their eggs in clusters of opaque sacs that floated just below the surface of the water and then bloomed into tiny translucent tadpoles whose pulsing hearts were visible, fast, violet flutters. I observed a spider making her waxy web, and then saw that web go to work as all manner of minute insects got trapped within its sticky strands. I learned, from a library book, that spiders have mouths, tiny hinged maws that they use to devour their prey, mercilessly, sometimes over a series of days, the prey losing its life in the worst way, bit by tiny bit, an elongated torture that could have, perhaps should have, suggested to me that animals, at least sometimes, are cruel.

And yet the spider didn’t seem cruel to me, and if you’d asked me why, at nine, I would have told you it was because the spider was acting the way it was supposed to. When she slammed me upside the cheek, or, worse, when, during wars, humans hung others from branches, asphyxiating them slowly so as to prolong their pain, people were acting
outside the alphabet.
This was the phrase that came to me, at nine, and now, at forty eight, I’m still not sure what it means. The animal world worked its spell on me in part because it could be spelled, full of mysteries, yes, but absurdities, no. Amongst animals one was grounded, tethered to the raveled rope that held us together as humans, but when you separated yourself from animals you separated yourself also from your own skin, and forgot what it was you, as a person, were supposed to do, or be. You made a fake face or gassed your young and instead of spelling stories you spread silence, which was
outside the alphabet.
I cannot say much more than this. All around me in those woods were alphabets, from the croaking of the frogs to the high hummings of the dragonflies to the callings of coyotes, as night neared, and the pond water darkened, and reflected back to me the stone in the sky.

July crept on, the whole earth, it seemed, baking in the heavy heat, and the animals of the forest grew drowsy, snakes sunning themselves on rotted logs. I found snake skins on the ground, amazed by their intricate patterns, which I started to sketch in a book I bought with my allowance money. I’d put the sketchbook in my bike basket and bring it down the private way with me and sketch the spiders I saw, the plants I saw, observing how they changed shape when water was near. At home I checked more and more books out of the library, my knowledge deepening even as my answers floated away. At nine, I didn’t mind the floating feeling, and if there is anything I wish I could hang on to from that time it is this: the ability to stay suspended in space, living the liminal, in a place where there was no such thing as stink. I often thought of her holding my shirt, bringing it up to her nose, and then tossing it into the wash the way she did. Animals can attack you but they will never, ever revile you. Only humans can do that.

As the forest grew around me and inside me, my own home began to fall away. It was as if the walls were coming down, one by one. The crying fights at night turned into screaming, my mother screaming in the hall, her hands clenched.
What is ON you?
she sometimes asked me, prodding at me with her sharply shaped fingernail. She aimed her eye on me much more than on my siblings, who either faded from her view or grew as proportionally precious to her as I was wrong. All wrong. Sometimes she sunk her nails into my skin and I dreamt they went right through me, her hands entering my entrails, pulling them out, string by string. At home, I began to be scared all the time. My older sister whispered to me that my mother was ill and would soon be going to a hospital. What at the age of nine did I know about mental illness and the genetic liability she passed on? I believed I’d found an escape. I had no inkling that over time my mother’s grief would become mine, and that eventually, years hence, I’d lose the capacity for comfort only to find it again, when I was a mother myself.

I learned partly by book, partly by eyes alone. Snakes with printed skins, their bodies cool to the touch. Deer prints looked like this, coyote prints like that. Down here was the scat of a brown bear. Chipmunks lived in that old stone wall, six of them, shy no matter how softly you sang. Squirrels, however, had harder hearts and would come for an acorn if you sat still enough, day after day after day. Moles ran by, blinded. Wrens sang just so. Starlings were harder to hear but prettier to the ears. I filled the basket of my bike with my sketching notebook and wrinkled raisins and curled cashews taken from the mirrored bar where their liquor bottles were. My mother drank the liquor, pouring a clear scorching liquid over crackling ice, lifting the glass to her lips and tossing it back. Sometimes, then, she sang, the sound not pretty. We listened to her lying in our beds, and then the song would stop and she’d start to talk;
you
, she’d say,
shed in the sheets; you
, she’d say,
put the keys in the hanging closet.
Sometimes my father was there but other times he wasn’t, and she went on anyway, talking to the walls, the window, the world itself, her first finger flexed and pointed, accusingly, at the moon.

I largely forgot about her in the forest, or at least it seemed I did. I didn’t know then that the mind, like the earth, has several layers: a crust, a mantle, a boiling core. I stayed up on top. I saw holes in the ground, ragged circles that went down, dark. I knelt and smelled something rank and alive in there. I planted the nuts from my parent’s liquor bar all the way around the entrance to those holes and then sat back, waiting in the shade. At last foxes appeared, their pointy faces popping up, their scrappy paws swiping the nuts down into their dens. I did this for days, and then stopped. Instead, now, I put the nuts on the forest floor, in a small pile, and then sat back against a tree, the food just a few feet from me. How close, I wanted to know, could we come? The foxes saw me and smelled the treats and knew what I was up to. In the earth below me I listened to their language, a panoply of chirps and gurgles and quick, high barks. They debated and decided, their heads poking up, dropping down, overtaken by ambivalence, until at last what looked like a large male made his way towards the pile, nose to the ground, his eyes all amber.
Click click
, with my tongue. The fox stopped, cocked his head, then started again. I got quiet in a way I’d never been before. I entered into stillness. The fox kept coming, his movements both slinky and slow, five curled cashews, crystalled with the grit of sparkling salt, midway between us. As he approached I could see his whiskers, the slope of his snout, the dark dots of his nostrils. It took some time, a long, long time, but at last he crept so close I could hear his breath and see him take the nuts with his teeth, his jaw working as he chewed, fast, then bent his head for more. He eyed me the whole time and then, when he was done, he turned away and trotted back into the forest.

It wasn’t until August that I found the egg. It lay in the forest on a little patch of grass, entirely alone, no bird near here. I scanned the sky between the branches but saw just chinks of blue and the faintest fingernail of an afternoon moon. I looked straight up the trunk of the nearest tree and then the tree after that and the tree after that, but there was no nest in sight. It appeared that this egg had been dropped straight from some solar system, perhaps carried down to the ground by a winged thing that had borne it but could not bear it, and so wanted to pass it on.

I picked up the egg. It was more delicate and perfect than anything I’d ever held and I knew, immediately, that I would keep it, that I would bring it back with me, into the Golden Ghetto. I pressed the orb to my ear and thought I heard, from within, a small slosh, and I pictured a thimble-sized being turning round and round, flexing its fleecy wings, opening and shutting its ruby beak as it readied itself for its enormous task, based entirely on faith, cracking the caul of your gorgeous surround in search of something still finer.

That day I filled my bike basket with leaves and grasses to cushion the egg on the long way home, and, for the first time, I brought a piece of the forest back with me, into the Golden Ghetto. Right from the start the egg made it seem like anything here could happen, and I believed this all the more when I showed it to my mother, carrying it into the kitchen, which was growing dark as the evening arrived, her silhouette, I remember, and my words:
Look, look
, my voice strangely soft, my hands cupped closed, my very being emanating a mystery she could not resist. “At what?” my mother asked, turning from the window towards me now, her own voice suddenly soft, too, mirroring mine, as if we were, indeed, under some spell, entirely transformed, I no longer with stink, she coming quietly across the kitchen floor to
look
,
look
, and when she was close I opened the hub of my hands and she saw resting down deep in my joined palms the tiny perfect orb of the egg and she said,
Oh. Oh.

And we two stood there for a second and I swear I saw her
oh
’s leave her mouth and drift off into the air, floating up like bubbles and breaking painlessly above us, the first
oh
rising, then the second
oh
following the first, and I said, “An egg, Mom, from the forest,” and she said, “What kind?” her voice rising up at the end of her question as voices often do, and so we were risen, even as we were, for the first time in a long time, tethered to the ground by quotidian conversation.
An egg, Mom. What kind?

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m going to look it up. Find out. A cardinal maybe.” I paused then. “Can I keep it?”

She leaned over again, to peer down into her daughter’s dark hands, where the egg lay, and I saw things stream across her face then, feelings, but I don’t know what those feelings were. With one finger she reached out and softly stroked the side of the egg and I watched, entranced, her finger going back, now forth, that finger from the same hand that had slammed me, and yet here she was, her second self, a gentler self rising to the surface of her skin, cracked open in kindness, or maybe by memory; I said, “
Mom.”

Mom.
I wasn’t calling her, or questioning her.
Mom.
I’d meant it as a chime but she took it as a “can I” question and stumbled backwards a bit and then said, as if confused, “Yes. Yes. We’ll make it a nest.” And then she paused. She was over by the sink now, leaning against it. I watched her. Years of tensions had crisscrossed her face and made her mouth crimped at its corners, but at just that moment I could see a second face behind the first, a face from long ago, a face from perhaps before she was even born, and this face was plain and open, the skin smooth and moist. It was like looking at her through a translucent shell she was trapped in, and how had that happened to her? To all the Golden Ghetto? “Yes, yes,” she said again, and again, that look of confusion, coming over her. She turned, looked back out the window over the sink. It was dark now, completely dark, and cicadas shrieked in the lawns. “How,” she asked, “will we keep it warm?”

My father found a shoebox, my sister a small desk light that we shone on it, for warmth. I placed the box on my bureau, across from my bed. That night they fought, as usual, and she cried, as usual, but instead of hearing her tears I kept hearing her question in my mind, and how her voice went up at the end, like a little wisp rising. I kept seeing her finger, unfurling, stroking the tiny egg, and I wondered if, when I was a baby, she had ever touched me like that. Was I once, I wondered, perfect to her, and as soon as the question formed it was followed by a kind of crushing grief, the sort for which there are no tears, and so you stare, dry eyed, out at your surroundings. Which was the Golden Ghetto and the treeless streets and the strict squares of neighboring windows. I didn’t know it then but I had just come up against a question that let loose within me the most primeval ache, and it could not be permanently packed away ever again, no matter how hard I tried, and I did try, again and again, for years.
Was I once perfect to her?
I saw myself as if from above, my cranky curls, scum on my skin, my chest now mounded ever so slightly, a pain when I pressed there, a deep pink singeing.

In our photo album was a picture of me at one year or younger, in a sailor’s dress and tied white toddler shoes, perched on her knees, her one arm around me, in her other hand a cigarette coiling silvery smoke. Fresh from my own little egg, she had held me with care, or even love, but then time took me, touched me, made me, somehow, all together
other
, a creature without classification. I saw her as she saw me, with scum on my skin, and a little window inside me shut and the shades were drawn and a darkness came, and I couldn’t come out of it. I walked to the sill, the grief settling like silt, and for years I would feel that wordless grief, casting its pall over everything—the tree, the chair, the chimney—and then, when it went, as it often did, coming and going, going and coming, my returned world was all the more beautiful to me.
The dividends of darkness
, I would later write in an essay about depression for which I found a treatment when I was in my twenties, another orb filled with a chemical concoction; it helped some days and then some days it didn’t. It all started, I think, that night, when I was nine. On my bureau I saw the box all aglow; the egg was warm inside. And why could that not comfort me? I should have slept soundly but, as it turns out, the light kept me up most of those nights, which grew cooler and cooler, autumn now right around the corner, school starting soon, the egg here, the forest there, and that was that.

In a perfect world full of perfect people who are exactly as they are meant to be and not who they become—shape shifted by cruelty, or terror, or simply rote repetition—in a perfect world, the egg would have cracked soon after I’d taken it home and from its shattered shell would have stepped a bird just as I’d dreamt her, singing like a strummed harp. But of course no world is perfect, neither those we build with our own hands, nor those we find for ourselves, full of foxes and moles and soft-stepping deer.