The Dogs of Littlefield (31 page)

In the same moment it also occurred to her that someone who had tried something terrible once would probably try it again.

The scent of roses grew stronger. Above arched the endless blue sky. Kismet was panting.

Naomi frowned at the pool. “Well, clearly we've got to
do
something.”

Margaret was thinking now of Julia, of all the people Julia would meet in her life who could turn unpredictably cruel or crazy, and all the countless people who were just careless, people who would not find Julia miraculous in any way. Julia with her small, pale, sober face, her downturned mouth and lank brown hair hanging about her thin shoulders—who but Margaret understood the absolute astonishment of her?

“I wonder what Clarice thinks about all this,” Naomi was saying. “Does she know? Is she home? Shall we invite her to join us?”

Hedy coughed. “Clarice,” she said, “is no longer with us. Went back to Chicago two days ago.”

“Without saying good-bye?”

Hedy coughed again. In a dry voice, she recounted the news that Dr. Clarice Watkins, associate professor of the University of Chicago's Department of Sociocultural Anthropology, had been doing research on
them
. Studying
them
. The residents of Littlefield.

“What on earth,” said Naomi. “Why?”

“It is her theory—I am just repeating—that we suffer from delusions of being in touch with the rest of the world. But since we are too comfortable to share the world's worries, we are paranoid because we also can't do anything to make sure we are safe, since the world is such a mess, so that is why we are afraid of everything.” Hedy poked the rubber tip of her walking stick at a loose patio slate. Out scuttled a beetle.

For several moments they were quiet.

“What else did she say?” Margaret touched the base of her throat.

“That we think our little problems are big problems, and every time we try to pay attention to the truly bad things in the world we are really just congratulating ourselves that they aren't happening to us.”

“Well, that's one way of looking at it. Anything else under her turban?” asked Naomi.

Hedy pursed up her mouth as if tasting a newly decanted wine. “Too many therapists and yoga studios and people online. Meanwhile our children are poorly educated and many of our attitudes are unconsciously racist.”

“We do have a lot of therapists,” allowed Naomi.

“That doughnut baker gave her an earful. She went on and on about
him
. Stranger in a strange land. Do you know what is strange? Mr. Skinny making doughnuts!”

In Hedy's lap, little Kismet whined.

“I can't remember everything she told me,” Hedy went on. “She says we have proved that life in the global village is provincial. But she has decided not to write a book about us, even though she took a lot of notes. She says her findings are too problematic.”

“Well, thank God for that.” Naomi slapped at a fly that had landed on her arm.

“I told her maybe she could write something else. Maybe a musical.”

“So how come she finally told you what she was doing here?” asked Margaret.

Hedy hummed a few bars of La Vie en Rose. Then she gave a small smile. “I asked.”

— —

The morning came and went,
and so did lunchtime and then more hours went by. It was one of those long, hot, breathless afternoons when the air was full of the meditative roar of air conditioners and no one could think of anything to do and even dogs didn't want to go outside. But by five o'clock it had cooled off a little, and Julia and her mother set out for a walk around the village.

The walk was her mother's idea, Julia hadn't wanted to go. First of all it was weird to be walking without Binx. She kept seeing dogs like him everywhere; she hadn't realized how many black dogs there were in the world until she'd had one herself. Second, she did not like to be seen in public with her mother, who at any moment might call her “sweetheart” or try to hold her hand. Two weeks ago, at dinner, her parents had told her they were going to try living apart for a while, “to see what that's like, to see if it might make us all happier,” both of them goggling at her like a pair of owls.

The dread she had felt that day in the woods and then for days afterward now seemed like a kind of trick, an extra betrayal. Her mother wasn't dying. She wasn't even sick. Julia's relief at this discovery had been so great that it turned almost instantly to fury.

“What's it like,” Mr. Gluskin had asked during their final lunchtime meeting, “knowing that your parents are getting separated?” She told him she didn't care.

“They're so annoying,” she said. “Especially my mother.”

But in a week Julia would go to an all-girls canoe camp in Canada (Mr. Gluskin's daughter was a counselor there and said it was empowering). Until then her mother insisted it was “motherdaughter time.” They'd already gone shopping at the mall twice and visited the dentist. Hannah had gone home after a sleepover and Julia was bored of reading about people's favorite cereals on Facebook, so when her mother suggested going for ice cream, even though it was before dinner, she had agreed, reluctantly, to come along.

In many yards the grass was already brown and the flowers parched and drooping. On the radio it said the temperature today could reach ninety-nine degrees, a record for the third week of June. A peppery scent wafted up from the hot sidewalk mixed with the smell of cement, but in yards where a sprinkler had been set going there was the cool, refreshing scent of wet grass. Here and there on the sidewalk was etched a brown leaf shape where a dead leaf had lain under the snow all winter, leaving behind a perfect skeleton.

Her mother paused to admire droplets of water that had caught on a spider's web strung between two tree branches in a yard with a sprinkler. “Look at that. Isn't that lovely?” She said that if you walked through a spider's web on a garden path in the morning, it meant you were the first person to have walked on the path that day. Julia refused to admire the spider's web and kept walking. Her mother had switched into isn't-the-world-
fascinating
mode, which lately she turned on whenever she was particularly worried about something.

They passed a house with a shaggy vine climbing on a lattice above the front door. Her mother described a wisteria vine that grew over the back porch of her mother's house when she was a girl and how she would stand under it pretending to be Juliet waiting for Romeo. After that she told a story about visiting her grandparents' farm in Indiana and lying in bed at night listening to trains whistle past the cornfields.

“Such a lonely sound,” she breathed. “But so beautiful. The world is full of beautiful things. Sometimes you can hardly stand it.”

I can stand it, thought Julia, keeping her head down and praying they would not meet anyone they knew.

Just before they reached the park they passed the house of an old lady on Endicott Road who grew white peonies in a bed of mulch at the end of her driveway. Her mother first pointed out that the peonies were lovely and looked like old-fashioned bathing caps covered with white rubber petals, and then that someone had backed into the peonies with a car and flattened half of them.

“What a shame. Mrs. Beale must be so upset. Peonies only bloom for a week. But while they last they're the most gorgeous, dauntless things in the world.”

As they stood contemplating the flattened peonies, Julia spotted Anthony Rabb on his front lawn a couple of houses down. He was cross-legged in the grass, whittling something with a knife. The blade flashed. His blond hair looked almost white under the hot sun.

“Let's turn around,” she hissed.

“What? Why?” said her mother. “We're almost at the park. I saw a fox on the soccer field once, did I tell you? With a long red tail, it was so—”

“No
,”
said Julia. But it was too late. Anthony had seen them and put up his hand to shade his eyes in their direction. After a moment he gave a small wave.

“Who is that boy? Do you know him? He looks cute.”

Her mother kept walking. It was too awkward to be left standing alone on the sidewalk, so at last Julia followed her.

Anthony squinted up at them from the grass. He was shirtless and barefoot, his legs covered with mosquito bites, some of which were bleeding. Something greenish was smeared on his chin. He got up, still gripping his knife and the piece of wood he had been carving.

“Hi, Julia.”

Her mother smiled. “So how do you two know each other?”

“He's in my class.” Julia felt she was speaking another language, probably Latin.

“How
nice
.”

The three of them stood facing each other on the flaring sidewalk, as if rendered insensible by the heat of the day. Julia thought she might actually black out.

“So what are you carving?” she heard her mother ask.

Anthony held out the piece of wood. Julia couldn't tell what it was, but it looked like it might be obscene. “It's a totem.”

“A totem,” repeated her mother. “To protect you from bad spirits? How interesting. Is it a bear? A jackrabbit?”

Anthony said he did not know yet.

“Julia hasn't told me your name, by the way.”

Anthony didn't say anything, so Julia made a muttered introduction.

“Well, we were just on our way to get ice cream,
An
thony.” Her mother was using the chummy voice she usually reserved for greeting repairmen at the front door. “Would you like to join us?”

Julia really did black out. But she came to in time to hear Anthony say, “Sure,” and see him fold his penknife and stick it in the pocket of his dirty khaki shorts along with his totem. He was so beautiful it seemed wrong to look at him.

“I'll walk on ahead and see if there's a line at the Dairy Barn.” Her mother smiled.

Unbearable! Horrible! Why did parents even exist? Once they had procreated they should be exiled forever to someplace far away, like Texas, to live among themselves and rattlesnakes, where they could do no harm.

Julia had dropped her head, limiting her peripheral vision to her own hair. As she walked along she counted sidewalk cracks, stepping on each one.

They were in front of Walgreens when Anthony said, “So was it like totally weird?”

“What?”

“Going under the ice that time. Was it weird?”

Julia walked along looking at the sidewalk cracks. “Yes,” she said finally. “I thought I was going to die.”

But this was said for effect and because people seemed to expect it. She had not thought she was going to die. She had not thought of anything for the minute or two after the ice broke beneath her, being entirely preoccupied with not dying.

“Worse things have happened,” she said as they passed the Forge Café. Which was what her mother said these days whenever she broke a plate or forgot to pick up milk. She'd said the same thing at dinner during the “living apart for a while” speech.

“But it was really scary,” she added.

“Cool,” said Anthony. Then he said, “Did you know Ms. Manookian is leaving to go teach in Lebanon?”

“Why?”

“I don't know. Maybe for a change.”

“Weird.”

“Really weird.”

At the Dairy Barn, Julia's mother treated them to double scoops, Rocky Road for Julia and plain vanilla for Anthony.

“I don't like flavors,” he said. “I've got food issues.”

Julia wondered if anyone from school would drive by and see her standing in front of the Dairy Barn having ice cream with Anthony Rabb. A cocker spaniel was tied by its leash to a parking meter. Julia stooped to pet it. Her mother said that people shouldn't leave their dogs tied to parking meters, didn't anyone ever learn anything? She looked up and down the street for its owner. Anthony licked his ice cream like a cat, neatly and with complete attention, making sure no ice cream got on his fingers, and then he threw the cone away with ice cream still inside. The cocker spaniel watched him with a shocked expression.

“Well, bye,” said Anthony, walking away.

“He didn't say thank you,” observed her mother.

“He's kind of annoying,” said Julia.

But on the way home she told her mother about Mr. Anderman coming into the cafeteria on the last day of school wearing a gorilla mask and the school nurse calling the police, afraid he was a psycho killer.

“That sounds upsetting,” said her mother, missing the point as usual. “And very irresponsible of Mr. Anderman. Oh, Julia. Look at that big horse chestnut tree. Did you know that its flowers change color once they're pollinated? To let the bees know. Isn't that interesting?”

“No,” said Julia, though she thought it was, actually.

A
storm blew in just before five o'clock.
It rained hard for fifteen minutes, enough to wash away the humidity; afterward the air cooled and the corners and edges of things stood out sharply. By seven the sun was shining again. Margaret had dried off two of the Adirondack chairs with a dish towel and was once more sitting by the pool, watching light dripping off the oak trees. In her lap was a book. A biography of Clara Schumann, which had looked interesting in the library.