The Dogs of Littlefield Read online

  As Margaret stared out of the window, thinking of Bill’s cold shut face and wondering when she had started to be afraid of him – not of him, exactly, but of his impatience with her, which lately seemed to border on aversion – she saw something glide behind the laurel bushes. An instant later a white shape flared up against the fence, like the illumination thrown by headlights of a passing car, and then slid away. But when she turned to look at the street it was dark and empty.

  Dr Watkins also had a dog. Aggie, an old yellow Lab, sleepy and benevolent-looking.

  Unusual for the Fischmans to rent the carriage house to someone with a dog. They had a dog themselves, an old gray toy poodle named Kismet, as fragile as a Fabergé egg. Kismet had her own chair in their living room and on rainy days wore a pink plastic raincoat; when Hedy encountered someone with a big dog while she was out walking Kismet she often crossed the street, casting reproachful glances at the other dog. People with big dogs did not always take into account that little dogs and their people might be afraid of them.

  Hedy and Margaret happened to meet on the sidewalk with their dogs a week later. It was one of those mellow, lingering New England fall afternoons, the light turning apricot as it settled onto hedges and into the tops of the trees, while the air held a brisk sharpened scent, like pencil shavings.

  Hedy pulled Kismet away from Binx, but stood close enough to talk to Margaret. Margaret asked after the new tenant.

  ‘Do you know,’ said Hedy, ‘I was supposed to rent to somebody else, but the college called and asked could I please take Dr Watkins. She was looking maybe three weeks for an apartment. Everyone said it was the dog.’

  Her small face was deeply wrinkled; but her eyes were dark and bright beneath a cap of thin, soft-looking gray hair that curled much like Kismet’s. As usual she wore a black velour tracksuit and black sneakers; she said Marv called it her Geriatric Ninja uniform.

  ‘Do you know what Marv thinks?’ she said now. ‘It was racist.’

  A word she pronounced with relish: ray-shist.

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so,’ said Margaret. ‘Not around here.’

  Hedy screwed up her face.

  ‘In any case, it was nice of you to rent to her.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Hedy. She toyed with her reading glasses, which dangled from a chain of jet beads. ‘Dr Watkins is very interesting. She likes Littlefield very much, even though no one would rent her an apartment. An enchanting village, she says. So heimlich, she says. A turban and she knows German? Do you know what I told her?’

  Margaret did not know.

  ‘I said it was a suburban shtetl.’

  Hedy often made provocative statements along these lines – to test her listeners, Margaret had decided. If you smiled, you were thoughtless. If you frowned, you were an idiot.

  ‘Well, most of us are pretty assimilated,’ sighed Margaret.

  Long blue shadows fell across the sidewalk. Up in a tree a mourning dove was calling out its sad wooing call. Ah-lone? Ah-ah-lone?

  By hunkering down onto the sidewalk, Binx had managed to creep close enough to nose Kismet’s hindquarters. Kismet growled.

  ‘Hah,’ said Hedy. ‘Look at them. Beauty and the Beast. No, you, Binx. Get away.’ Binx sat back, pink tongue hanging from the side of his jaws. ‘I heard another dog was poisoned. Yesterday at the park. A terrier. It ate something.’

  ‘Oh, please no, not again.’

  ‘Poisoned hamburger, maybe.’

  ‘I can’t believe it.’

  ‘I said to Dr Watkins, don’t take that dog to the park. It is too dangerous. Maybe she doesn’t listen. Her dog seems well-behaved. But you should not take him.’ Hedy pointed at Binx sitting on the sidewalk panting at Kismet. ‘He wants into everything.’

  Binx raised his head, panting more widely.

  As they stood talking, Dr Watkins came out of the carriage house with her yellow dog on a leash and made her way down the cobbled driveway, which was littered with acorns like minute cannonballs. She was wearing red patent-leather pumps, a green silk print dress and a mustard-colored turban, and in the poignant evening air these colors, too, seemed saturated, superimposed on the scene behind her. Despite the cobbles and the acorns, she walked easily in her red pumps, swaying from side to side, her dog plodding in front, head down like a cart horse.

  ‘Dr Watkins,’ called out Hedy. ‘Hello. Have you met Margaret?’

  Dr Watkins called back that Margaret and her little girl had brought over cookies. So kind. She didn’t know people did such neighborly things anymore.

  ‘Now please, you must stop calling me Dr Watkins,’ she said to Hedy as she drew close to them, scowling with mock severity and shaking a finger. ‘I am not a cardiologist. Please call me Clarice.’ Looking up at Margaret, she smiled. ‘Such a beautiful evening.’

  Binx and Aggie sniffed each other.

  ‘It certainly is a beautiful evening,’ said Margaret.

  ‘We are talking about dogs being poisoned,’ said Hedy.

  Dr Watkins said it was a terrible thing and she had read about it in the Gazette. Then she said to Margaret, ‘Dr Fischman here tells me you’re the lady who found the dog? That must have been very disturbing.’

  ‘Yes, it really was,’ said Margaret. ‘To be honest, I can’t stop thinking about it. I feel like I keep seeing it.’

  Dr Watkins laid a hand across her chest.

  ‘And now it is two dogs,’ Hedy went on. ‘One is an accident. Two is strange. And three, God forbid, would be –’

  ‘A phenomenon,’ supplied Dr Watkins.

  ‘It is that no-leash business. People let dogs run in the park with no leash and suddenly people who hate dogs think dogs are taking over the town.’

  Margaret reached down to scratch Binx between the ears. Pink cloud bergs drifted above them in the still-blue sky.

  Dr Watkins remarked that it was true she had never seen a town with so many dogs. And with so many mixed breeds: golden doodles, schnoodles, cockapoos, puggles. Years ago when she read Dr Seuss books she’d encountered these same creatures and thought they were imaginary.

  ‘Hah!’ Hedy turned to Margaret. ‘You are right. That is what is happening.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Assimilation.’

  Dr Watkins smiled again, showing the gap between her teeth.

  ‘Maybe we could all have dinner sometime,’ Margaret said quickly. ‘I’d love to have everyone to dinner and, Clarice, maybe you could tell us about your lecture series.’

  Dr Watkins said she would be delighted and then she and Aggie went off down the street on their walk.

  Hedy watched them disappear around the corner. ‘I don’t care. I am going to call her Dr Watkins. I like the way it sounds. Or maybe just Watkins. My dear Watkins.’

  ‘I think you should call people what they want to be called.’

  ‘Oh, yes? What should we call you?’

  Margaret said Margaret was fine.

  ‘Yes? Well.’ Hedy was shaking her head. ‘You wait and see. Do you know what I am saying? With all these dogs, these are very strange times.’

  6.

  The leaves of Littlefield had turned red, yellow and deep bronze, drifting across glowing green lawns, onto hedges and doorsteps and the gleaming roofs of parked cars. As they walked to school, children ran to catch falling leaves before they hit the ground. In the collective gardens, purple aster and ragweed bloomed where the gardeners quit weeding and the pumpkins were fat and orange. Soccer season had reached its apex and in the afternoon squads of girls in yellow jerseys, black shorts and black knee socks sprinted back and forth in the park, while coaches blew whistles and soccer balls flew into the bright air. Houses, stop signs, bicycle fenders, all wore a precise gleaming look, a clarity brought on by the cool dry weather, and in the evenings the light turned gold as it was gathered into the harlequin trees, caught within nets of branches and leaves.

  On Rutherford Road, white cobwebs stretched across the rhododendrons in houses
where children lived and construction-paper witches and black cats decorated the windows; houses without children had at least a Hubbard squash on the front steps, or hanging from the doorknocker a spray of red and yellow bittersweet.

  Three more dogs had been poisoned since Margaret Downing found George Wechsler’s dog in the park. A Bellingham terrier, a rescued greyhound and a malamute named Violet that was a registered Canine Health Aide and visited bedridden residents at Avalon Towers. Photos of each dog had appeared in the Gazette. Last week the police issued a statement that someone trying to poison coyotes was accidentally poisoning dogs instead and warning the public against taking coyote control into their own hands. Two letters to the Gazette put forward other theories: one suggested that the poisoner was trying to frighten supporters of the off-leash dog park; the other, written by a local biologist, pointed out that bittersweet was deadly poisonous: the dogs might have ingested autumn decorations. People should be careful about what they bring into their houses. A public hearing had been scheduled at the town hall to address the off-leash dog park proposal and it was expected that the poisonings would be addressed as well.

  These notes and impressions were recorded into Dr Clarice Watkins’s laptop, along with what she’d overheard at the Forge Café, where she had taken to sitting at a window table with a view of Brooks Street. The Forge Café occupied a storefront on the site of what was once a blacksmith’s shop; a rusty anvil was displayed in the front window, often topped with a wicker basket of plastic daisies. Today the front window had been painted for the Halloween Window Painting contest: within a taped rectangle two white ghosts played soccer with an orange pumpkin, using tombstones as goalposts. She regarded the ghosts closely for a moment before sitting down at her usual table.

  Just an hour before, she had attended a Littlefield girls’ soccer game, borrowing a fleece lap rug and a folding nylon chair from her neighbors the Downings, who, when she’d expressed interest in local youth sports, had invited her to watch their daughter Julia’s team play a team from Walpole. She sat on the sidelines cheering with the Downings and other families at the park as pink-cheeked girls with muddy knees thudded past, ponytails wagging. Julia Downing was on defense and hung back, often contriving to be elsewhere when the ball hurtled toward her. She was smaller than the other girls. Thin brown hair straggled from her ponytail and stuck to her pale neck. Her expression was tense, wary, at the same time disbelieving, as if she were baffled by everyone else’s urgency as they rushed back and forth on the field.

  ‘Come on, Julia,’ shouted Bill Downing, less encouragingly as the game went on.

  Margaret Downing said, ‘Don’t yell at her. She doesn’t like it.’

  Halfway through the game, as Littlefield tied the score, Bill said, ‘Look at that Hannah. She’s amazing. Three goals.’

  And Margaret said, ‘You’re always watching Hannah.’

  Dr Watkins noted down these comments on a steno pad, along with typical exhortations:

  ‘Good hustle, Annie!’

  ‘Get up there, Katie!’

  ‘Go, Rachel, go!’

  Only when a pair of gray F-15s from Hanscom Field streaked low overhead, like a pair of flung darts, did the encouraging cries cease for a minute or two.

  ‘Where are they going?’ one father wondered as the shattering noise receded.

  ‘They’re going somewhere,’ fretted a mother.

  The game continued on; a Littlefield forward charged the goal with three minutes left. ‘Shoot! Shoot!’ screamed the crowd. The ball circumscribed an exquisite arc to land just behind the leaping Walpole goalie, her gloved hands reaching, while the cold sun gleamed along the antennas of parked cars and clouds rushed across the bright blue sky.

  ‘Great game,’ called Bill Downing a few minutes later, when Julia and another girl trudged across the field. ‘Give me five, Hannah. You were on fire!’

  ‘You played well, honey,’ Margaret told Julia.

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ said Julia. ‘Did you hear those planes?’

  After ordering a cup of coffee, Dr Watkins opened her laptop to read the news online. She subscribed to four newspapers and scrolled now through each of them, clicking first on an article about a Libyan militia attacking a school with rocket-propelled grenades, then on an account of hearings on Afghan war atrocities. In the past hour, the sky to the east had turned a bruised purplish color above Brooks Street while the sun continued to shine in the west; behind the glowing red and yellow leaves, the shining telephone poles, the chimneys and rooftops, the sullen sky hung like a flat scrim, as if the village were a stage set illuminated by klieg lights.

  Outside the café’s window, beyond the soccer-playing ghosts, a red-faced young father in a royal-blue fleece vest was trying to quiet a crying toddler on a bench in front of the Dairy Barn. A thin, dark-haired boy pedaled furiously past on a green bicycle, eyes narrowed, bike chain rattling, brown and orange leaves flying up from the gutters in his wake. Several yards away two young girls were texting on their cell phones under a crimson maple tree, both frowning, sunlight patchy on their shoulders.

  As she sat watching this mildly absorbing scene, it came to Dr Watkins that behind the young father, behind the crying toddler, the texting girls – behind even the boy on the bicycle, that blank-faced boy, with the wind in his face, eyes narrowed, bike chain rattling, brown and orange leaves flying up from the gutters in his wake – behind all of them trailed shadows of previous citizens, previous lengthening restless autumn Saturday afternoons.

  She opened a new document and began typing:

  For nearly three hundred years people have passed along these same streets. It seems almost possible to glimpse them, those vanished residents: a booted plowman with his oxen, his goodwife in an apron feeding her chickens. It is almost possible to hear them, the plowman shouting at his oxen by the dry cleaners, the woman soothing her chickens in front of the nail salon. For nearly three hundred years this village, like Sleeping Beauty’s castle, has remained largely undisturbed by events consuming the rest of the world …

  Littlefield had come to her attention one morning six months earlier, when it appeared on a Wall Street Journal list of the Twenty Best Places to Live in America, each a small city or large town, most around fifty thousand residents, all boasting ‘natural beauty’ and excellent public schools. ‘Good quality of life’ was the general descriptor, along with ‘Quiet and safe’.

  As she read through the Wall Street Journal list at breakfast, she reflected that all around the world sociocultural anthropologists like herself were embedded in traumatized places, examining the effects of violence, oppression, need, fear. Why, she wondered, at first idly, then with quickening interest, was no one studying good quality of life?

  Littlefield was sixth on the list. Leafy streets, handsome old Victorian houses, fine public schools and a small liberal arts college, and a pond in the middle of town, with a bathhouse and lifeguards in the summer. Littlefield was also, she discovered, home to roughly one percent of the nation’s psychotherapists.

  Three years ago she had received high praise for her study of the effects of global destabilization on urban matriarchal structures, based on her fieldwork in Detroit’s inner-city neighborhoods and in the labyrinthine vecindades of Azcapotzalco, in Mexico City. (‘A thoughtful new voice,’ read a review in American Anthropologist.) But she’d published little since, engulfed by her teaching duties and by her students, who emailed her day and night with questions and pleas for extensions, visited her office to complain about their grades, then stayed to talk about demanding parents, drunken boyfriends, suicidal roommates – all of this so distracting that she had not been able to settle on a subject for another book. A critical issue for an assistant professor up for tenure in two years.

  How did global destabilization, she wondered, register among what must be the world’s most psychologically policed and probably well-medicated population?

  Over the next months, she held lengthy discussions w
ith Dr Awolowo, her department chair, who, after some hesitation, approved a sabbatical and helped her obtain a fellowship at Warren College. It had been hard to leave her mother, who was getting old and melodramatic, and who had objected strenuously to that year in Azcapotzalco. Still harder had been leaving Dr Awolowo, whom she loved silently and hopelessly (not even her mother knew how she felt about Dr Awolowo), but with dignity, allowing herself a single expression of her feelings: adopting a turban headdress after overhearing the department secretary mention that Mrs Awolowo wore a turban. But by the end of August she had sublet her apartment, packed two boxes of books, along with a set of curtains and several embroidered throw pillows to recreate a homelike atmosphere, also a rubber plant she had nursed through two blights, said farewell to her mother (who at the very end turned up the volume on her TV and pretended not to hear) and drove east with Aggie the dog to Littlefield.

  She’d begun visiting the Forge Café after the first dog was poisoned, deducing that she might listen discreetly to conversations in such a central location; earlier she had attempted to eavesdrop on a small group at the park and felt herself observed. The goal was to blend in with the local population, difficult in her case; the only other black people she had encountered in Littlefield so far had been a cashier at Walgreens and a bagger at Whole Foods.

  According to a brass plaque beside the cash register, the Forge Café had been owned and operated by the Jentsch family since 1957. Coffee was served in thick white china mugs; hamburgers and club sandwiches came on thick white china plates, with a side of potato chips, whether you wanted them or not, and a pickle spear. In a Lucite container on the counter sat thick hand-cut doughnuts, glaze hardening throughout the day. The Forge Café was neither as clean nor as efficient as Starbucks across the street, and some people said the coffee tasted like scorched bicycle tires, yet older businessmen and even a few of the aldermen considered it necessary to spend half an hour or so every week perched on the rounded stools at the gold-flecked linoleum counter, eating Mrs Jentsch’s hand-cut doughnuts, no longer made by Mrs Jentsch, who now lived in Boca Raton, but by a Pakistani law student who came in at five in the morning.