The Dogs of Littlefield Read online

  18.

  It was Hedy Fischman’s birthday. She was eighty-four. No party, she’d told Clarice. Too much fuss. As Marv always said, any fuss was too much fuss. Since Marv died, Clarice and Hedy had fallen into the habit of having dinner together once or twice a week. Maybe just a little dinner, said Hedy, when Clarice proposed a celebration. Clarice bought colored party hats and pink and yellow crêpe-paper streamers to decorate the carriage house kitchen, and roasted a pair of plump squabs, flavored with cumin and served with wild rice and a corn-and-red-pepper chutney. She downloaded a recording of Edith Piaf, Hedy’s favorite chanteuse, as she called her, singing ‘La Vie en Rose’. Two votive candles on the table, a bottle of white wine.

  At exactly six thirty, Hedy appeared at the carriage house door in her black velour tracksuit, reading glasses swinging on their beaded chain; she was leaning on a walking stick, little gray Kismet at her heels. ‘Ah, Edith,’ she said, listening for a rapturous moment. ‘That miserable woman!’

  After tripping over the little dog in April, she’d started using the walking stick – not a cane, but a telescoping staff, the kind used by hikers and villains in spy movies. She made a humorous show of brandishing her stick now at Aggie.

  Perhaps it was only the brightness of the kitchen, but as Hedy sat down at the table it seemed to Clarice that she had shrunk over the past few months and when she put on her glasses her dark eyes became huge in her sharp old face, as if she were staring at something astonishing.

  Outside the kitchen windows it was broad daylight.

  Hedy eyed the squab on her plate and said she felt like a cat under a bird feeder, but she ate with greater appetite than usual, greedily picking the little bones clean. They wore the party hats, silver with blue stars; each drank a glass of wine. They spoke of how no one went out walking after dark in the evenings anymore, people seemed afraid to leave their houses. The police were not doing enough. A new citizens’ organization had been formed, an online group. Patrols, they were proposing. Video cameras posted on telephone poles and mailboxes.

  ‘So much bad news,’ said Hedy. ‘Let’s talk about something else.’

  For a long time they talked of Hedy and Marv’s life together – fifty-two years – their trips back to Israel, a trip to Poland ‘to visit my demons’, their practice, all the things they had done. Blueberry cobbler for dessert, served in a bright yellow dish. One pink birthday candle stuck in the middle. Even the dogs had a treat: organic milk bones.

  Just enough fuss, was Hedy’s opinion.

  After they had eaten the cobbler, the two women removed their party hats gingerly, so as not to snap their chins with the elastic bands; then, leaving Edith Piaf singing and the votive candles still burning, carried their coffee through the living room, where Hedy spotted Naomi Melman’s book, The Bright Side, on the coffee table, and said that Edith Piaf was proof that you could indeed feel good about bad things, and then out to the little back porch. They settled into the two wicker rocking chairs, which squeaked and crackled in mild protest, flakes of white paint drifting onto the porch floorboards. Aggie and Kismet lay down on the porch between them with companionable sighs and groans and soon began to snore. Hedy drank her coffee noisily, then set the mug on the floor. A few minutes later, she was snoring gently as well.

  Clarice rocked back and forth, looking at the laurel bushes in their bed of pachysandra and listening to the evening around her, the dee-dee-dee of a little black-capped bird in the hedge, the rush of a car passing on Rutherford Road. At seven thirty the sky was still full of light, one of those soft spring evenings when the breeze smelled of honeysuckle and felt like silk, the air laden with promise and desire. She tried to imagine what it would be like to live with someone for fifty-two years and then, one day, to find that person gone.

  Dr Awolowo’s long, handsome, creased face appeared among the laurel leaves. His dark fingers stroked his gray beard, reaching up to adjust the heavy black frames of his glasses, the lenses catching the light of the setting sun. Clarice, my dear. She felt his beard brush her cheek.

  A firefly bobbed in the laurel bushes, winking at her between the dark leaves.

  She sighed and rocked for a while longer, looking at the gray fence at the end of the yard. Tomorrow she had a lecture to give; it was getting late. She was about to stand up, to wake Hedy and suggest they go back inside, when from the other side of the privet hedge came the twang of a screen door opening and then the sound of it snapping closed, followed by footsteps.

  Wood scraped against stone, two people were settling down in chairs. After a moment, voices began speaking, one male, one female, both pitched low, yet audible. It was Bill and Margaret Downing, but their voices sounded so concentrated, so reduced that they might have been speaking from inside a box.

  ‘She can’t hear us out here. She’s watching a movie up in her room.’

  ‘Well, let’s keep it down. Now go on, tell me again what you said just now in the kitchen.’

  ‘That I’ve been wanting to tell you. I’ve been waiting to tell you. That it just never seemed like the right time – you’ve been so depressed –’

  ‘How long?’

  Clarice could feel the pulse in her fingertips against her coffee mug.

  ‘A few weeks. A month.’

  ‘Every day?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  In the blue sky hung a pale, round, pitted moon, looking strangely like the vaccination mark high on her mother’s arm. She realized she was holding her breath.

  Hedy was awake and had put on her glasses. She lifted a finger to her lips. From a distance came the rattle of the trolley, passing through the village, and the faraway sound of singing. The voices continued.

  ‘Are you in love with him?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’

  ‘So why –?’

  ‘Why am I telling you this now? Because I want to find out if it even matters to you.’

  ‘Of course it matters to me.’

  Another long pause. On the worn porch floorboards Aggie moaned in her sleep. Light was slowly draining out of the sky, absorbed into the leafy treetops as if they were great tender green sponges.

  There came the soft sound of someone weeping.

  Hedy was rocking in her rocking chair with a ruminative creak. The little bird had fallen silent but deep in the shadows by the fence was a dry rustling, like something small tunneling through old leaves buried in the pachysandra.

  Finally one of the voices began again.

  ‘We’ve been married for a long time. We’ve gone through a lot together. You and Julia are all I have in the world.’

  The other voice said nothing.

  ‘But I’m still young enough. It’s not all over for me. I don’t want it all to be over for me. I don’t want to be with someone who says I make him feel dead.’

  A breeze sighed raggedly through the laurel bushes. Once again the firefly blinked on and off, disappearing only to reappear again somewhere unexpected. Hedy’s lower lip was pushed out. She was shaking her head.

  This time the voices were silent for so long that it seemed as if the conversation must be over, but just as Clarice began to think of standing up they resumed.

  ‘So I’ve had a little time to think. Tell me. Is it just about sex?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Because, you know, if it’s just about sex, I want you to know, I think it’s okay with me.’

  ‘It’s okay with you?’

  ‘If it’s just about sex.’

  Aggie moaned softly again, paws twitching.

  ‘What do you mean, it’s okay with you?’

  The other voice did not answer.

  ‘What are you saying to me?’

  Again there was no answer.

  Then out of the waiting silence came a low guttural cry, a cry so bereft and abandoned that it seemed hardly human; the hair stood up on the back of Clarice’s neck and she felt her heart stumble. Still the moon sailed overhead, stony-
white and more clearly outlined since the sky had darkened.

  Hedy was leaning on her walking stick, the rocking chair rocking emptily behind her with a sound like knuckles on wood. The dogs hauled themselves up as well and stood with their noses pointing toward the back door of the carriage house. As she got to her feet, Clarice’s legs were trembling as if they had gone to sleep.

  She opened the door and then one after the other they walked inside and made their way silently back to the kitchen, back to the pink and yellow streamers and the toppled party hats on the table, the plates smeared with the purple remains of blueberry cobbler. The votive candles were still burning; Edith Piaf sang on in her tragic, scratchy voice. They sat down heavily.

  In her black velour tracksuit, Hedy was as dark as a crow. Clarice watched her pick up a shard of pie crust and crumble it between her little claws.

  ‘Very sad,’ she said at last. ‘They always seemed like such a nice couple. So attractive. Her especially. But as Marv always said, every house is haunted.’

  Clarice nodded dumbly. Not for the first time, she wondered if Marv had actually said all the things Hedy said he said. And then she realized that in such a long marriage it probably did not matter, and also that she had the answer to what she had been wondering before.

  They stared at the littered table. Edith Piaf was once more singing ‘La Vie en Rose’.

  ‘Well, there it is,’ repeated Hedy. ‘What can you do but feel sorry? Tomorrow I must go to the grocery store. I am out of eggs. With an egg, Marv always said, you can survive anything.’ She sighed. ‘Thank you very much for dinner. It was so nice. Come, my Kismet. Are you under my chair? Yes? Little beast? Little monster? Time to put you to bed.’

  Clarice stood on the steps, watching Hedy and the little gray dog make their slow, careful passage along the shadowy driveway to the back steps of the big dark house. Hedy had left a light on above her back door and as she reached the door she turned to lift a hand.

  Across the driveway, lights were on inside the Downings’ house. It appeared they had gone in. Yes, there was Margaret, moving alone past the kitchen windows, pausing now at the sink, now opening the refrigerator, now returning to the sink.

  ‘How I hate making dinner,’ she had told Clarice a few days ago when they happened to meet in the driveway. Margaret was watering pots of red geraniums with a green garden hose. Emily Orlov had just dropped off Julia, who’d been babysitting for her little boy. Before going into the house, Julia had demanded to know what was for dinner.

  ‘Chicken stew,’ said Margaret.

  Julia made a face like someone forced to eat sand and slunk off. After watching her go, Margaret went back to watering the geraniums, playing with the hose so that arcs of water flew like sparkling lassos into the air. That’s when she said she hated making dinner.

  ‘I have made dinner almost every night for fifteen years,’ she added with a little laugh. ‘And no one ever really likes what I make. Sometimes they don’t even notice what it is.’

  Inside the carriage house kitchen, Clarice closed her yellow curtains. She blew out the votive candles and turned off Edith Piaf. She ate the rest of the blueberry cobbler and drank what was left of the wine, and then washed the dishes and stacked them in the dish rack to dry, threw away the party hats and the crêpe-paper streamers. She went up to her bedroom and took two sleeping pills, though it was only nine o’clock. She washed her face, brushed her teeth, put on her nightgown. While she lay in bed, waiting to fall asleep, she did not think of Dr Awolowo, as she usually did at night, or of her notes, or even of the grant proposal she was writing, but of Margaret Downing standing with her hose, making lassos of water in the air.

  19.

  Her mother had agreed with the school guidance counselor that Julia should quit soccer and oboe lessons until the fall because it would be a good idea for her to have some unscheduled time. Julia saw the guidance counselor every Tuesday and Thursday during lunch. Mr Gluskin. Mr Gluskin had a huge jar of jellybeans on his desk and let her take as many as she wanted. He called them his ‘magic pills’ but otherwise he was okay. Mostly they ate their sandwiches and talked about soccer.

  ‘Did you see Mr Gluskin today?’ her mother would ask, when she got home. ‘How was it?’

  ‘Fine,’ Julia always answered.

  One night at the dinner table her mother suggested Julia might want to see an actual therapist, but Julia said only loser freaks went to therapists. It made her feel sick, that her mother wanted her to see a therapist.

  At least she hadn’t said ‘the worry doctor’, like some kids’ parents.

  Her mother was the one who should see a worry doctor. She walked around the house holding her hands out with her palms up, as if she were catching raindrops, or she stood looking out of the windows. Sometimes she could hear her mother in the hallway, breathing outside her bedroom door. If Julia wanted to walk into the village, her mother wanted to go with her. If she came down to the kitchen for a snack, her mother wanted to fix it. ‘How are you?’ she asked all the time. ‘How are you feeling today?’ ‘I love you,’ she said, every night at bedtime. ‘No matter what happens I want you always to remember that. And anything you ever want to tell me, I want you to know that you can. I love you so much.’ Then she would sit on the edge of Julia’s bed, looking at her expectantly. Julia always shuddered. The thought of saying I love you filled her with a kind of marshy horror, similar to when she opened the pool filter and found dead frogs floating belly up, so fleshy and fragile, so hopelessly swollen. But her mother seemed to be waiting for her to say something, so she could ask questions and worry about it.

  ‘You worry about me too much,’ she said to her mother one night. And her mother said, ‘It’s my way of watching over you, even when I can’t be there.’

  Three or four times in the evenings, her mother had been in the kitchen, looking out of the window as she made dinner, and then suddenly she demanded, ‘Do you see? I think you do.’ But when Julia looked out of the window, nothing was there.

  The house was too quiet. Binx had quit barking – ever since he’d had his operation, he lay on the floor whining. He’d stopped growling at people and trying to bite the mailman. Julia tried to make it up to him, patted him and brought him dog bones, but he only looked at her with his penny-brown eyes and then turned his nose to the wall. Lost his mojo, said her father. ‘Just a little traumatized,’ her mother said. But he was almost catatonic. Even waving toys at him, which usually made him growl and charge like a mad bull, didn’t work.

  She was only allowed on Facebook for an hour a day; also she’d dropped her cell phone in the girls’ bathroom two weeks ago and someone stepped on it, so no texting, and now she’d read all the Twilight books twice. So when Nicholas Orlov’s mother asked if she’d like to start coming over on Tuesday afternoons to watch Nicholas, Julia said she would.

  Surprisingly, her mother had agreed to this plan.

  ‘Tuesdays?’ she repeated, standing in the kitchen holding a dishtowel.

  ‘Until five.’ Julia finished eating an apple and threw the core at the trash can but missed, then waited for her mother to yell at her to pick it up.

  ‘I’ve been asked to accompany the middle school chorus on Tuesdays,’ her mother said instead. ‘Naomi recommended me. They lost their usual accompanist. It would be good for me to get out of the house. But I thought you might want me to be here.’

  ‘No,’ said Julia. ‘Why would I?’

  Sometimes nasty remarks like that could make her mother cry. But this time her mother kept twisting the dishtowel and staring abstractedly at the pie tin wall clock over the stove, as if she were using the clock to figure out a word problem in math.

  Mrs Orlov had been looking for a regular nanny since Mr Orlov moved out, but so far hadn’t found one because Nicholas screamed every time a nanny came to be interviewed. But he liked Julia. At least he didn’t scream when she showed up at the front door, though often he screamed later on. Mrs Orlov paid her
five dollars an hour. Hannah got eight dollars at the Saltonstalls’ – but that was for two kids; also those girls got into fights and had to be separated, and insisted on doing dress up and face painting, which had to be cleaned up afterward. There was only one of Nicholas and he just played with Lego.

  Julia had gone to the Orlovs’ house for the past two Tuesdays. Her mother had insisted on driving her each time, though it was only three blocks, and Mrs Orlov dropped her back at home. But today her mother had to be at chorus rehearsal early, so Julia would have to walk.

  Binx was lying in the middle of the kitchen floor like a gigantic ink blot, hardly moving. The vet had prescribed some sort of anxiety medication for him. The pills were pretty, bright blue; they reminded her of Mr Gluskin’s jellybeans, but they hadn’t done anything yet. To make up for leaving him alone, Julia decided to give Binx an extra one now, wrapped in a piece of roast beef. He seemed a little happier right away, so she gave him one more.

  ‘He must be sad,’ she said, stroking his big head, ‘that he’ll never have children.’

  ‘He’ll be all right.’ Her mother was looking out of the kitchen window as usual. Above the sink the goldfish circled their ceramic castle as if hypnotized. ‘He’ll get over it.’

  But she suggested Julia take Binx along to the Orlovs’. ‘He could use getting out of the house, too. I’ll call Emily right now and ask.’

  Mrs Orlov thought a visit with Binx would be nice for Nicholas, who had been missing Boris.

  ‘So what do you want to do today?’ Julia asked after Nicholas’s mother had left them in the living room with a pile of Lego. It was just after three. They were sitting cross-legged on the carpet while Nicholas worked on a Lego helicopter. He was wearing yellow shorts and a red T-shirt with a blue stegosaurus on it.

  Binx lay next to them on the carpet, farting.