The History of Great Things (2 page)

T
he Christmas when you're seven, after much discussion, your mother and father decide it's time to bring home a puppy, a West Highland white terrier. This is, without a doubt, the greatest thing that has ever happened in the history of great things. Marjorie is less sure, because when Daddy brings him out, he hands you the puppy first, so in this moment Marjorie has never been more sure that you are the favorite, whether or not that's true. The puppy is supremely cute, a wiggly little sausage of white fuzz—but this moment is altogether different for Marjorie from the one you're having. You're slow to pick up on anything beyond the puppy licking your face, in spite of the fact that Marjorie is whining that she wants her turn, and Mother quickly takes the puppy from you to hand it to Marjorie, who gives you the raspberry.
Let's name him Whitey!
you say, your father says
That sounds like a good one
. Marjorie rolls her eyes.
Yeah, that took a lot of brainpower, how ever did you come up with that?
she says, to which you say,
Because he's white!
as though that isn't the very reason for Marjorie's little barb, which has gone right over your head.
Tell them the rules, Mother
, your father says, sitting back down in his chair. He lights a cigarette and rubs the eczema from his arms, an unconscious habit that your
mother cannot break him of and which has left a fine white dust that no amount of daily vacuuming can fully remove from the deep recesses of the chair. You will later say you felt you knew that dust better than you ever knew him.
I swear
, Mother says,
one day this chair will be made entirely of your father
, an image you can't quite make sense of. He's got one of those nubby beanbag ashtrays that sits on the arm of the chair (which beanbag has its own weather system of dust), and a pocket on the side for his
Reader's Digest
s, his primary occupation when he's not at work or the lodge. Mother explains all the work that goes into having a dog: feeding, walks, grooming; she will supervise, but this is to be your responsibility.
And if you don't keep it up, sayonara, Whitey!
your father says. Neither of you kids has ever heard the word “sayonara” before, but you get the gist. And because you are good kids, you both care for the puppy well, walking and feeding him on schedule, though ultimately you and the puppy become so inseparable that Marjorie gives up trying and you happily take on her Whitey chores just so you can say he's
your
dog. At one point you make the case for letting him sleep in your bed, to which Daddy laughs in your face
. Lois already hogs the bed as it is!
Marjorie says.
Do not! Do so! We'll both stay on my side, I promise! No dogs in the bed
, Daddy says.
That's that. I win
, Marjorie says. You give her a big wet raspberry close to her face, she gives you a shove.
Daddy! Marjorie shoved me!

Now you're eight, Marjorie's eleven. Whitey is overall a great dog but has gotten into the habit of barking incessantly when no one is home and then again for another hour or two after you get home from school. The neighbors all around have complained and you have tried various things with no success: alarm clocks, stuffed toys, putting him in a crate in the basement; all seem only to make him bark more.

One afternoon you come home from school and there is no barking and there is no Whitey greeting you at the door.
Whitey! Here, Whitey!
Nothing.
Marjorie, where's Whitey?
you call upstairs.
How should I know? He's your dog
, she yells down. Mother emerges from her sewing room to tell you not to worry, she put Whitey out in the yard to chase a squirrel.
Phew!
you say and head for the back door.
Whitey!
you call, but he doesn't come running, and you don't hear him and you don't see him and you're not worried yet because he has a long staked chain for when he's outside and sometimes he sleeps in a cubbyhole under the back porch, which is exactly where you find him, but which is weird, because he usually wakes up when he hears you call him.
Hey, Whitey
, you say, and something moves in your stomach you've never felt before, it isn't nausea, it isn't butterflies, it's a new and terrible moving, and you bend down and reach out to Whitey and he is as still as the ground beneath him, and you start to shake, and you say,
Whitey
, even though you already know, you've never seen anything more dead than a smushed spider before but you know Whitey's gone, and you burst into tears, calling
Mommy! Whitey! Mommy! Mommy!
Though you always call your father Daddy, you almost never call your mother Mommy. She comes running outside, sees you crying,
Whitey!
you say again, she looks under the porch at Whitey and back at you, takes you into her chest, you're heaving now,
Shh, child, it must have been Whitey's time to go to heaven.
Marjorie comes outside and asks what the crybaby's crying about this time, sees Whitey under the porch, goes a bit white; Marjorie's tougher than you but it's still a lot for a kid to take, her cute dog dead under the porch. Marjorie says nothing, just sits down. You look at Marjorie with suspicion. She's not upset. You've read a half-dozen Nancy Drew books. The quiet ones are always the suspects.

Your father digs a grave for Whitey in the back, puts him in a cardboard box. The only thing worse than seeing Whitey in that box is seeing your father close the box. He puts the box into the hole in the ground, shovels the dirt back onto it. The four of you are standing around the grave, staring at the hole in the ground.
Can I go inside now?
Marjorie asks.
Shush
, Mother says. You've never been to any kind of a funeral before. Your mother asks if you'd like to say a few words.
To Whitey?
you ask.
Can he still hear me?
In a way, yes
, she says.
You know how the lord watches us, and we say prayers to him, even though we can't see him?
You do know, though you have never understood this; the concept is frightening, that entities are watching you that can't be seen: newspapermen, the lord.
Good-bye, Whitey.
You have no words. Your frown is like a caricature of a frown, chin out, lower lip forward and trembling. It's the worst kind of sadness you've known, but you can think of nothing else to say. You stand there silent, Marjorie sighs and huffs loudly, waiting for the go-ahead to leave. You remember something from
Brenda Starr
.

I will avenge your death!

That night, you position yourself at the very edge of the bed, as far away from your dog-murdering sister as you possibly can; a centimeter closer and you'd be in real peril.
I know what you did
, you whisper to Marjorie, facing away.
What?
Marjorie asks. She hasn't heard you
. I know. I know.

I
t's 1942. You're six, Marjorie's nine. You and Marjorie are getting dressed for church. Marjorie laughs hysterically upon noticing that your blouse is inside out.
No it is not! Look at the seams, dum-dum, that goes on the inside, not the outside. Shut up!
You're
a dum-dum! Hey, I don't care if you want to embarrass yourself.
Mother hears the scuffle and comes in, screwing on one of her real pearl earrings.
Girls! What's this fuss about? Marjorie called me a dum-dum! Lois said “shut up”! Girls. That's enough. Lois, sweetie, let me help you fix your blouse.
She takes your blouse off and turns it inside out, helps you button it up.
Told you
, Marjorie says. You stick your tongue out at her.
Enough, girls. Goodness, you're on your way to church, this is no way to behave. Why do we have to go anyway, Mother? Lois, we've talked about this many times
, she says, helping you on with your sweater.
Because that's where the lord is
, Marjorie says with no affect, not helping to convince you. You have heard that the lord is other places too, specifically wherever you are. You have talked about this many times, or perhaps more correctly you have been
talked to
about this many times, but you are coming into an age when new information sometimes causes confusion, where there are gaps between answers and questions, when you could ask about ten different
questions in response to
That's where the lord is
, though this will come to no good. There's usually a one-question-per-kid allotment about such matters before you are shushed and given the customary
That's just the way it is
, or
The lord works in mysterious ways
, which is creepy and unsettling, because that could mean anything; if the lord works in such mysterious ways, couldn't he just creep right into your room at night and spy on you and take your things and who knows what else? But you keep it to yourself, store up your questions.
Go downstairs and get your coats on, girls
, Mother says,
I just have to remind your father when to take the pie out of the oven before we go. How come Daddy doesn't ever have to come to church?
you ask before you can remember to be quiet. Remembering to be quiet has proven to be a challenge.
Because he's the man, Lois.
You have by now gathered a certain amount of information about what the man does versus what the woman does. The man, as you add it up, does whatever he feels like or doesn't, and the woman does everything else. The why of it, you have no idea.

I want to be a man when I grow up
, you tell Marjorie. Marjorie laughs, says
Good luck
. You have no idea what's so funny.

At nine or ten, during science class, you mix some chemicals together that burn your eyes, and after this you have to wear glasses. Mother wears glasses, so you don't mind—you like being like your mother—but Marjorie calls you “four-eyes” and so you try not to wear them any more than you have to. Marjorie says
Ha-ha, good luck getting a boyfriend, four-eyes
, and nine- or ten-year-old you begins to fear you'll never have a boyfriend; even though you have previously not been so sure you wanted one, you want one now because Marjorie thinks you won't ever have one, and that is enough to make it a priority in the near future, when people start having boyfriends, which is thank
fully a few grades away yet. You have no idea how beautiful you are. When you've asked
Am I beautiful?
the answer more than once has come back
Charm is deceitful and beauty is vain
, but the meaning of this phrase is never explained to your satisfaction. You are told further that
the lord shall cut off all flattering lips and the tongue that speaketh proud things
, triggering a series of nightmares in which your face ceases to exist from the nose down. Nor are you clear on the difference between metaphorical and literal, and by the time you learn about this in English a couple of years later it will be far too late. You will be told how gorgeous you are, often, in that already-too-far-away future, long past the time when it might have settled in your mind as true. Marjorie has always known, but she's always been jealous, so she won't be the one to point it out.

Y
our father gets offered a teaching job in Baton Rouge, nine hundred miles south, and takes it.

Hurricane Betsy arrives when you're about four. The worst hurricane in forty years, say the news reports. Fred and I find this real funny, since it hits us in Louisiana not long after your lengthy tantrum period has finally come to an end. We lose power for several days, a couple of small trees, but we're lucky overall. You imagine, based on your knowledge of
The Wizard of Oz
, that your house could up and fly away with you in it and land somewhere else, that this might be exciting, like, what if it landed in New York City, where Mommy keeps going? You don't have any clear picture of New York at this point, though I've sent you a copy of
Eloise
, so you more or less imagine your house blowing onto the top of the Plaza Hotel, and you and Mommy and Daddy together again, everything pink and stripey and happy and togethery. Your father explains to you the difference between a hurricane and a tornado, what the winds and rains are capable of doing. A flat, wet house does not sound so great.

I'm going back and forth between there and New York often during this time, but your dad takes good care of you while I'm away. When you're not at school, he's on the floor of your
bedroom pretending to be the mommy in the kitchen with no complaint, and knowing him, no concern at all about the irony of that; he's at the edge of your bed reading you books, there are never enough books, he reads you the same books over and over,
The Bad Child's Book of Beasts
,
Hop on Pop
, gets you new books from the library every week. You ask for one more book every night and he reads one more and you ask for one more again and he reads one more again and if you wake up from a bad dream, which happens often, because sometimes he lets you watch
The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
(just because the sounds of Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin's names please you), even though you don't understand most of what the show is about and the overall tension level makes you dream that you're being chased through your kindergarten by Soviet spies, he comes and sits with you in the dark and tells you that all Soviet kindergarten spies have been apprehended by Solo and Kuryakin, not to worry. He takes you to the zoo, he brushes your hair, he makes sure you brush your teeth; he's not so good at doling out punishment, but generally you don't need too much of that. He writes me to say that you're the best, brightest daughter ever, and that you learn to read when you're three, can't get enough of it. You write me letters like this (transcribed by your father, of course):

                    
Dear Mommy,

                    
I can only write the alphabet letters now but I can read! I sound out the words and Daddy is happy. We read all day. I am a big girl now. Daddy says so. Daddy plays kitchen with me and puts my bathing suit on me and turns on the sprinkler outside and I run in it. I hope New York is fine.

Love,
                    

Betsy