What Comes Next and How to Like It

  Daphne is the kind of dog you could do anything to, you could jump on her, you could pull on her lovely ears, anything, and she wouldn’t object. But this morning she discovered one of the deer’s leg bones, stripped of flesh, hoof attached. Some animal must have dragged it out onto the lawn last night. When I approach her to take it away, she growls and snarls.

  I am proud of her.

  The only time I have been even mildly irritated with Daphne was this morning when I woke to discover big holes in my new blue sheet, and a bigger hole in the mattress pad, its cottony innards distributed all over the floor. I have had this mattress pad for a long time. I don’t feel sentimental, but it does have its visible history. It endured Harry’s inadvertent peeing, something else’s vomit, other leakages I can’t easily explain, all manner of grunge from dogs that got ground into it despite 350-thread-count sheets, and an explosion of blue from a ballpoint pen, which is fading to purple, like a bruise, after many washings. This was due to my grandson Joe’s drawing-in-bed habits, when he lived here some years ago. Also many small black specks I examined compulsively hoping to find them inanimate, which they were.

  Mattress pads are expensive, the choices bewildering. Which to choose? Why do they cost so much? Looking through catalogs, I find that most of the comfiest ones appear to be composed of something Daphne would love to sink her teeth into. And a feather bed is out of the question, alluring though it may look; it’s too much money, and I can already envision its contents floating in air and dusting the floor.

  “Bad Daphne,” I said. She rolled on her back, feet up, ready to play.

  Googling

  I don’t remember what this particular assignment was, but a woman in one of my memoir classes wrote about an old love, the one that got away, the one she had thought about, daydreamed about, wondered about for years. She found him on Facebook, and wrote him. They planned to meet at a restaurant in New York. She laid out all her clothes on the bed and tried everything on before she settled on what to wear. She bought new shoes. She had her hair cut. She probably put on blush. Then she took the bus to Manhattan. She is seventy.

  Her old love was every bit as nice as she recalled. They had a pleasant time, they talked about what had and what hadn’t happened, they talked about what their lives had been like. They drank wine. He told her he had been devastated when she left him to marry another man. But he was heavy and bald and had been happily married for years.

  How on earth can anyone survive without a daydream? I wondered.

  “What a terrible loss,” I said. “How can you stand it?”

  “We can be friends now,” she said.

  Before I got pregnant and married and my life zigged off in an unexpected direction, there was another boy I loved. He was handsome and kind and sexy and gentle. We met on the Amagansett beach, where I’d gone every summer of my life. Everyone knew everyone else, but this boy was a stranger. He looked almost like a man. I was seventeen, and looking good, and I got up and strolled into the water as nonchalantly as possible what with my heart beating so fast. I dove through a wave, and when I surfaced there he was. His eyes were merry, but they were old, as if he knew things I’d never know, but life still amused him.

  I googled this old love, to reassure myself that he was still there somewhere, and perhaps remembered us those years ago. Although we hadn’t seen each other in over fifty years, and we had never slept together, I felt close to him. Sure enough, there he was on his own website, complete with email address. I wrote him a short note, ending with “I used to daydream about you a lot, a long time ago.” He wrote back. He said he remembered the first time he saw me. “You walked down the beach and into the ocean,” he said. This made me smile. “It was an electrifying moment. I followed you. We rode some waves. We made a date for that night. My next memory is of you leaning against a tree and pulling my body into yours in an embrace and kiss that I’ve never forgotten.” He said some more things, all of them nice. He too is happily married, has kids and probably grandkids.

  He remembered what I remembered. It was like being on that beach again, seventeen years old. I could taste the air, see the blue of the water, remember the heat. I printed out his email. I lay around for hours daydreaming, a welcome remove from reality.

  Then the lovely youthful feeling floated out of reach. I was seventy-one again, not seventeen. But I folded my friend’s email and put it in the special section of my wallet where I keep my Medicare card. It goes with me everywhere. Sometimes, on rainy days when I feel unlovely, I read it.

  Speaking of Amagansett

  My grandmother’s house is for sale for $3.3 million. It hasn’t been ours for years. She bought it in the nineteen forties for $11,000. It used to be an inn, but that was before my grandmother’s time. There are eight bedrooms on the second floor. Nobody has made an offer. The only heat comes from an enormous grate on the floor of the dining room. My sisters and I used to love to stand there on cold mornings, our nightgowns billowing up.

  I think of it as my grandmother’s, because it’s that kind of house, the kind you claim, or perhaps claims you. It’s the second on the left, the one with the wide gray porch. I still have dreams where I’m sweeping leaves off that porch, leaves from the elms that disappeared in the fifties, whether felled by a hurricane or done in by disease I can’t remember. It doesn’t matter—those are the leaves I will sweep until I die and the memory dies with me. At the end of the road is the Atlantic Ocean. My family moved often, but every summer we went back to that house where nothing changed. The sheets always smelled of lavender, the parlor was always as hushed as church, the library, a small crooked room whose walls were lined with books, was the place the grown-ups gathered every afternoon for drinks. Pink gins.

  The smell of privet, all those giant bushes that lined the road to the beach, is the smell of summer. Yes, there were roses, the split-rail fence we walked on barefoot was covered with wild climbing roses, but the smell that overwhelmed me was the blossoming privet.

  The kindhearted real estate agent let me walk through, because if it doesn’t sell soon, the present owner will tear it down. Nothing personal: it’s a question of money. The land may be more valuable without the house. It doesn’t matter how old the structure is (196 years), or how wide the floorboards, or how delicate the tracery on all the hinges of all the doors. It no longer matters which room my grandmother died in, or that she kept red geraniums on the kitchen windowsills. Nothing matters anymore except the money. Not the transoms, not the peeling wallpaper in the tiny rooms in three corners of the attic, not the beautiful banister, not the cold back bedroom that said, as soon as you were settled, Get up get up get up, and you did. The darkness of the steep back stairs, what happens to that? It doesn’t matter. If the house doesn’t sell by next month, the whole thing comes down. I walked through every room, the bones of the house were the same as I remembered. All the doorways in the right places, the windows.

  My daughter Sarah came with me, bringing her camera. It was afternoon, there was a familiar square of light on the parlor floor, a few scraps of furniture here and there. Sarah took a picture in one of the empty rooms. I am headed toward the door, my face turned to the camera. I am expressionless, my body a blur. There is a strange fog by the window.

  The house has been torn down. Nothing is left but the old white fence. There used to be privet bushes everywhere. “The smell of privet is the smell of summer for me,” I say to Catherine.

  “Yes, Mom,” she says, “I know. Your memories are my memories now.”

  Sarah

  Sarah snuck back in the middle of the night and removed the long wooden banister, polished by a hundred and fifty years of hands, carrying it away like a family heirloom. Sarah can do anything she sets her mind to, even if it means breaking the laws of physics.

  Irony

  I read On the Road for the first time when I was sixty-eight. I should have read it when I was youn
g, because what struck me was how heartbreakingly innocent it was, and how boring. I was puzzled until it hit me that there wasn’t any irony in there. Was innocence the opposite of irony? I became obsessed. What is irony? Where did it come from? When did it take over? How do we get rid of it? I asked Chuck if he thought irony was an enhancement of life or a scrim that keeps us at a remove. He said maybe irony is the lens through which we see the picture in reverse. I wrote that down. Sometimes I think one thing, sometimes another. These days I’m apt to think of irony as a suit of armor.

  “Wit distances us,” said Northrop Frye. I have Chuck’s copy of Anatomy of Criticism. He gave it to me years ago, when I was feeling ignorant, assuring me it was easier than I thought, and interesting. I love his notes in the margins. I will never give it back. If he asks, I will say I lost it.

  I plan a day where I wake up and eschew all ironic casts of thought. I will do everything directly, look everything in the eye, take it at face value, experience one thing at a time. A Day Without Irony, I imagine a new national holiday. This morning I settle on the porch, looking out at the yard, the mountain beyond, absorbing yellow leaves and blue sky and green grass; the moment extends itself. The radio is on in the next room providing white noise. I have the dogs with me, and I am doing very well until eight words distinguish themselves from all others on the radio: “one hundred strands of hair from Che Guevara . . .”

  It turns out that his hair is being auctioned off. His hair. Not only was the man executed, but years later his hair is being sold by capitalist pigs. I assume they are capitalists although perhaps not pigs. Perhaps they are putting their children through school.

  I have various unformed thoughts about irony, thoughts that have not reached what I think of as the soft ball stage (using a metaphor from cooking fudge). To continue the cooking metaphor, I have had the epiphany which may be nothing more than having reinvented the wheel, that equal parts of innocence shaken up with equal parts of experience, like salad dressing, make, no matter how hard you resist it, irony, if the bubbles of innocence separate after a while from those of experience. If they mix completely you probably wind up with cynicism. But wait, what about wisdom? Wisdom, I decide, looking again at those yellow leaves, lies in the decision to mix up a fresh batch every morning.

  A Dream

  All my dogs were lost and then one by one they came back, my Rosie among them. She was healthy and beautiful. How surprised and delighted I was to see her! I had completely forgotten she died. We lay down together to sleep, and I stroked her lovely body, and she laid her head on my shoulder as she often did. When one of the other dogs came near, she snarled. My Rosie. When I woke, she was gone. I have collected river stones to put on her grave. “Thank you,” I say over and over, placing them on the slab of bluestone that is her grave.

  Losing It

  This morning after waking up at five with the dogs, I went back to bed at nine for a little pick-me-up nap. I lay under the red comforter, Daphne lying next to me, her head on my stomach. I felt peaceful. Thoughts and stories went in and out of my head. My memory, I decided, is not a meadow, not the view from a hill, or even a city street. My memory is an archipelago. I then pictured an archipelago, thousands of small islands forming something whose shape I could not determine, resting as I was under the comforter, too happy to think straight. (Happiness seems not to require a full set of marbles.) Other thoughts came in and out, disintegrating like smoke before I could get hold of them, and I began to think that losing track of oneself, entering the stage where you couldn’t remember much of anything that made sense, might be pleasant, as long as the loss was at a distance, a speck on the horizon to arouse curiosity, not dismay. I will explain this to my family, before I forget.

  Exercise in Futility

  A very small woodpecker is beating his brains out against a piece of metal on the telephone pole across the street. Bangbangbangbangbang. I stand underneath. “There are no bugs in there,” I call up to him, “you’re going to blunt your beak,” but he keeps hammering away. We have a lot of woodpeckers. Great big ones, and the noise they make is very loud. Maybe this poor baby thinks he’s doing it right. There’s a lesson in this somewhere, and I hope I’ve already learned it.

  “I can’t even guess what the lesson is,” says Chuck, having taken this in.

  “He thinks he sounds cool. He doesn’t care if he isn’t getting anywhere.”

  “Maybe he’s just persistent. Maybe he’s a percussionist.”

  You are so obstinate, I think.

  “Maybe he thinks it should yield to his awesome power.”

  “I think you just finished it for me,” I say.

  “I don’t think so,” says Chuck.

  The end.

  Whereabouts

  After a nap or in the middle of the night I wake up and realize I have no idea what town I’m in or what street I live on. Which direction are my feet pointing, which way is north, where are the windows and doors in this bedroom? It takes me a moment, but then there are the warm bodies and sweet snores of my dogs, and I know it doesn’t really matter where I am.

  Bad Dog

  Sadie used to live next door. The man who took care of her couldn’t keep her in the yard. She craved freedom, I guess. He put in a stockade fence. She got out. He buried cement blocks under the fence. She got out. He put chicken wire on top of the fence. She got out. He sat on the roof for three hours, watching to see how she did it. She stayed in.

  She came trotting over here if I was home. She jumped into my lap if I was sitting outside. She pushed through the dog door if I was inside. She once arrived breathless with two inches of chewed-off leash still attached to her collar. How not to love a dog like this? She barked loudly one dark rainy night, and I found her on the kitchen steps, soaked and shivering. I let her in, dried her off, and she slept with us. It was a lovely night.

  But she had once been found miles away on the Wittenberg Road barking at somebody’s chickens. She had been seen wandering down Route 212, which is a busy road. I worried about her. Every time her owner picked her up, I worried about the next time she’d escape. What if I was away? I began wondering how I could secretly just keep her. But I couldn’t come up with a decent plan.

  Her owner loved her too, and was determined to outfox her. “I’ll take her,” I began suggesting, when I sensed his growing frustration. “I have the underground fence, and she’ll be safe.” He shook his head, taking the reluctant little thing home. “What if she gets hit by a car?” I said, desperate. “Well,” said this otherwise perfectly nice man, “if she gets hit, she gets hit. That’s her fate.” I grumbled to all my kids. How could anyone say such a thing? But he had been struggling for years to keep her safe. He was getting calls from neighbors, from police, from the ASPCA. It was so clear to me that I should adopt her, why couldn’t he see this? I offered $300 for the scamp. But he was not going to be bested by a little black dog that weighed maybe eighteen pounds. He nicknamed her Houdini and took her home, time after time.

  Then one day he called. I could have her. School was starting, he teaches at night, and he couldn’t possibly keep running to pick her up wherever she was that wasn’t here with me. He said I was probably better for her than the pound, where he had once, in exasperation, threatened to take her. She was mine? Sadie was mine? I had a moment of elation and terror. What had I gotten myself into?

  Sadie has been here almost a year. According to her vet ­records, she is half Lab and half boxer. I see no sign of either. She has chewed up two sofas, four chairs, innumerable socks, and several books. She has destroyed four ottomans. Anything left on the floor is hers, including rugs, and I warn visitors not to take off their shoes. She has eaten three comforters, once ­Daphne’s specialty. She nips the back legs of whichever dog is in front of her on the way downstairs. She relentlessly teases Daphne, who went from pup to matron almost overnight. When another dog seeks attention, she sidles him or her
out of the way. If Daphne gets on my lap (and Daphne is a big girl), Sadie jumps up too, and they find a way to share me as I struggle to breathe. As I read this over I don’t know how I stand it. If I didn’t love this dog so much, she’d be dead.

  My friend Nona suggested I get her a ThunderShirt. This is a comfy soft jacket that fits the way swaddling clothes fit, and is meant to make an anxious dog feel safe. It worked for two days. Then I taught an afternoon class, was gone for hours, and came home to find a cushion off the little rose-colored chair in hundreds of pieces. I’m not sure Sadie is an anxious dog, exactly. She just doesn’t like it when I leave. Maybe, as several people have suggested, she needs Prozac. Maybe she needs a crate, or training, or spring to arrive. Meanwhile, I use a spray bottle of water to stop her when she won’t quit bothering Daphne. It works pretty well.

  After a tiring day of destruction, she sits on my lap and puts her forepaws on my chest. Then she stares intently at my face. She licks my nose. Sometimes she snorts directly into my nose and I get a brief and mysterious high. When we go to bed, she fits herself in the crook of my arm, lays her head on my shoulder.

  And she sleeps.

  Blue Skies

  After Catherine’s diagnosis, when I began to paint again, I went back to painting woods, dark woods you wouldn’t want to enter alone. She has had clear scans twice now. Now all I paint are skies. Blue skies, white clouds. Every scrap of glass becomes a sky. There is a bit of blue sky on my left foot. My hands are blue.