by Anne Tyler
“Narcotics?”
“Guard training, attack training, poison-proofing, kennelosis—”
“Wait, I don’t even know what some of those things are,” Macon said.
“I can even teach split personality.”
“What’s split personality?”
“Where your dog is, like, nice to you but kills all others.”
“You know, I think I may be over my head here,” Macon said.
“No, no! Don’t say that!”
“But this is just the simplest problem. His only fault is, he wants to protect me.”
“You can take protection too far,” Muriel told him.
Macon tried a little joke. “ ‘It’s a jungle out there,’ he’s saying. That’s what he’s trying to say. ‘I know better than you do, Macon.’ ”
“Oh?” Muriel said. “You let him call you by your first name?”
“Well—”
“He needs to learn respect,” she said. “Five or six times a week I’ll come out, for however long it takes. I’ll start with the basics; you always do that: sitting, heeling . . . My charge is five dollars a lesson. You’re getting a bargain. Most I charge ten.”
Macon tightened his hold on the receiver. “Then why not ten for me?” he asked.
“Oh, no! You’re a friend.”
He felt confused. He gave her his address and arranged a time with the nagging sense that something was slipping out of his control. “But look,” he said, “about the fee, now—”
“See you tomorrow!” she said. She hung up.
At supper that night when he told the others, he thought they did a kind of double take. Porter said, “You actually called?” Macon said, “Yes, why not?”—acting very offhand—and so the others took their cue and dropped the subject at once.
seven
When I was a little girl,” Muriel said, “I didn’t like dogs at all or any other kinds of animals either. I thought they could read my mind. My folks gave me a puppy for my birthday and he would, like, cock his head, you know how they do? Cock his head and fix me with these bright round eyes and I said, ‘Ooh! Get him away from me! You know I can’t stand to be stared at.’ ”
She had a voice that wandered too far in all directions. It screeched upward; then it dropped to a raspy growl. “They had to take him back. Had to give him to a neighbor boy and buy me a whole different present, a beauty-parlor permanent which is what I’d set my heart on all along.”
She and Macon were standing in the entrance hall. She still had her coat on—a bulky-shouldered, three-quarter length, nubby black affair of a type last seen in the 1940s. Edward sat in front of her as he’d been ordered. He had met her at the door with his usual display, leaping and snarling, but she’d more or less walked right through him and pointed at his rump and told him to sit. He’d gaped at her. She had reached over and poked his rear end down with a long, sharp index finger.
“Now you kind of cluck your tongue,” she’d told Macon, demonstrating. “They get to know a cluck means praise. And when I hold my hand out—see? That means he has to stay.”
Edward stayed, but a yelp erupted from him every few seconds, reminding Macon of the periodic bloops from a percolator. Muriel hadn’t seemed to hear. She’d started discussing her lesson plan and then for no apparent reason had veered to her autobiography. But shouldn’t Edward be allowed to get up now? How long did she expect him to sit there?
“I guess you’re wondering why I’d want a permanent when this hair of mine is so frizzy,” she said. “Old mop! But I’ll be honest, this is not natural. My natural hair is real straight and lanky. Times I’ve just despaired of it. It was blond when I was a baby, can you believe that? Blond as a fairy-tale princess. People told my mother I’d look like Shirley Temple if she would just curl my hair, and so she did, she rolled my hair on orange juice tins. I had blue eyes, too, and they stayed that way for a long long time, a whole lot longer than most babies’ do. People thought I’d look that way forever and they talked about me going into the movies. Seriously! My mother arranged for tap-dance school when I wasn’t much more than a toddler. No one ever dreamed my hair would turn on me.”
Edward moaned. Muriel looked past Macon, into the glass of a picture that hung behind him. She cupped a hand beneath the ends of her hair, as if testing its weight. “Think what it must feel like,” she said, “waking up one morning and finding you’ve gone dark. It near about killed my mother, I can tell you. Ordinary dull old Muriel, muddy brown eyes and hair as black as dirt.”
Macon sensed he was supposed to offer some argument, but he was too anxious about Edward. “Oh, well . . .” he said. Then he said, “Shouldn’t we be letting him up now?”
“Up? Oh, the dog. In a minute,” she said. “So anyway. The reason it’s so frizzy is, I got this thing called a body perm. You ever heard of those? They’re supposed to just add body, but something went wrong. You think this is bad. If I was to take a brush to it, my hair would spring straight out from my head. I mean absolutely straight out. Kind of like a fright wig, isn’t that what you call it? So I can’t even brush it. I get up in the morning and there I am, ready to go. Lord, I hate to think of the tangles.”
“Maybe you could just comb it,” Macon suggested.
“Hard to drag a comb through it. All the little teeth would break off.”
“Maybe one of those thick-toothed combs that black people use.”
“I know what you mean but I’d feel silly buying one.”
“What for?” Macon asked. “They’re just hanging there in supermarkets. It wouldn’t have to be a big deal. Buy milk and bread or something and an Afro comb, no one will even think twice.”
“Well, I suppose you’re right,” she said, but now that she’d got him involved it seemed she’d lost interest in the problem herself. She snapped her fingers over Edward’s head. “Okay!” she said. Edward jumped up, barking. “That was very good,” she told him.
In fact, it was so good that Macon felt a little cross. Things couldn’t be that easy, he wanted to say. Edward had improved too quickly, the way a toothache will improve the moment you step into a dentist’s waiting room.
Muriel slipped her purse off her shoulder and set it on the hall table. Out came a long blue leash attached to a choke chain. “He’s supposed to wear this all the time,” she said. “Every minute till he’s trained. That way you can yank him back whenever he does something wrong. The leash is six dollars even, and the chain is two ninety-five. With tax it comes to, let’s see, nine forty. You can pay me at the end of the lesson.”
She slipped the choke chain over Edward’s head. Then she paused to examine a fingernail. “If I break another nail I’m going to scream,” she said. She took a step back and pointed to Edward’s rump. After a brief hesitation, he sat. Seated, he looked noble, Macon thought—chesty and solemn, nothing like his usual self. But when Muriel snapped her fingers, he jumped up as unruly as ever.
“Now you try,” Muriel told Macon.
Macon accepted the leash and pointed to Edward’s rump. Edward stood fast. Macon frowned and pointed more sternly. He felt foolish. Edward knew, if this woman didn’t, how little authority Macon had.
“Poke him down,” Muriel said.
This was going to be awkward. He propped a crutch against the radiator and bent stiffly to jab Edward with one finger. Edward sat. Macon clucked. Then he straightened and backed away, holding out his palm, but instead of staying, Edward rose and followed him. Muriel hissed between her teeth. Edward shrank down again. “He doesn’t take you seriously,” Muriel said.
“Well, I know that,” Macon snapped.
His broken leg was starting to ache.
“In fact I didn’t have so much as a kitten the whole entire time I was growing up,” Muriel said. Was she just going to leave Edward sitting there? “Then a couple of years ago I saw this ad in the paper, Make extra money in your off hours. Work as little or as much as you like. Place was a dog-training firm that went around to
people’s houses. Doggie, Do, it was called. Don’t you just hate that name? Reminds me of dog-do. But anyhow, I answered the ad. ‘To be honest I don’t like animals,’ I said, but Mr. Quarles, the owner, he told me that was just as well. He told me it was people who got all mushy about them that had the most trouble.”
“Well, that makes sense,” Macon said, glancing at Edward. He had heard that dogs developed backaches if they were made to sit too long.
“I was just about his best pupil, it turns out. Seems I had a way with animals. So then I got a job at the Meow-Bow. Before that I worked at the Rapid-Eze Copy Center and believe me, I was looking for a change. Who’s the lady?”
“Lady?”
“The lady I just saw walking through the dining room.”
“That’s Rose.”
“Is she your ex-wife? Or what.”
“She’s my sister.”
“Oh, your sister!”
“This house belongs to her,” Macon said.
“I don’t live with anybody either,” Muriel told him.
Macon blinked. Hadn’t he just said he lived with his sister?
“Sometimes late at night when I get desperate for someone to talk to I call the time signal,” Muriel said. “ ‘At the tone the time will be eleven . . . forty-eight. And fifty seconds.’ ” Her voice took on a fruity fullness. “ ‘At the tone the time will be eleven . . . forty-nine. Exactly.’ You can release him now.”
“Pardon?”
“Release your dog.”
Macon snapped his fingers and Edward jumped up, yapping.
“How about you?” Muriel asked. “What do you do for a living?”
Macon said, “I write tour guides.”
“Tour guides! Lucky.”
“What’s lucky about it?”
“Why, you must get to travel all kinds of places!”
“Oh, well, travel,” Macon said.
“I’d love to travel.”
“It’s just red tape, mostly,” Macon said.
“I’ve never even been on an airplane, you realize that?”
“It’s red tape in motion. Ticket lines, custom lines . . . Should Edward be barking that way?”
Muriel gave Edward a slit-eyed look and he quieted.
“If I could go anywhere I’d go to Paris,” she said.
“Paris is terrible. Everybody’s impolite.”
“I’d walk along the Seine, like they say in the song. ‘You will find your love in Paris,’ ” she sang scratchily, “ ‘if you walk along the—’ I just think it sounds so romantic.”
“Well, it’s not,” Macon said.
“I bet you don’t know where to look, is all. Take me with you next time! I could show you the good parts.”
Macon cleared his throat. “Actually, I have a very limited expense account,” he told her. “I never even took my wife, or, um, my . . . wife.”
“I was only teasing,” she told him.
“Oh.”
“You think I meant it?”
“Oh, no.”
She grew suddenly brisk. “That will be fourteen forty, including the leash and the choke chain.” Then while Macon was fumbling through his wallet she said, “You have to practice what he’s learned, and no one else can practice for you. I’ll come back tomorrow for the second lesson. Will eight in the morning be too early? I’ve got to be at the Meow-Bow at nine.”
“Eight will be fine,” Macon told her. He counted out fourteen dollars and all the change he had loose in his pocket—thirty-six cents.
“You can pay me the other four cents tomorrow,” she said.
Then she made Edward sit and she handed the leash to Macon. “Release him when I’m gone,” she said.
Macon held out his palm and stared hard into Edward’s eyes, begging him to stay. Edward stayed, but he moaned when he saw Muriel leave. When Macon snapped his fingers, Edward jumped up and attacked the front door.
All that afternoon and evening, Macon and Edward practiced. Edward learned to plop his rump down at the slightest motion of a finger. He stayed there, complaining and rolling his eyes, while Macon clucked approvingly. By suppertime, a cluck was part of the family language. Charles clucked over Rose’s pork chops. Porter clucked when Macon dealt him a good hand of cards.
“Imagine a flamenco dancer with galloping consumption,” Rose told Charles and Porter. “That’s Edward’s trainer. She talks non-stop, I don’t know when she comes up for air. When she talked about her lesson plan she kept saying ‘simplistic’ for ‘simple.’ ”
“I thought you were going to stay out of sight,” Macon told Rose.
“Well? Did you ever see me?”
“Muriel did.”
“I guess so! The way she was always peering around your back and snooping.”
There were constant slamming sounds from the living room, because Edward’s new leash kept catching on the rocking chair and dragging it behind him. During the course of the evening he chewed a pencil to splinters, stole a pork-chop bone from the garbage bin, and threw up on the sun porch rug; but now that he could sit on command, everyone felt more hopeful.
“When I was in high school I made nothing but A’s,” Muriel said. “You’re surprised at that, aren’t you. You think I’m kind of like, not an intellect. I know what you’re thinking! You’re surprised.”
“No, I’m not,” Macon said, although he was, actually.
“I made A’s because I caught on to the trick,” Muriel told him. “You think it’s not a trick? There’s a trick to everything; that’s how you get through life.”
They were in front of the house—both of them in raincoats, for it was a damp, drippy morning. Muriel wore truncated black suede boots with witchy toes and needle heels. Her legs rose out of them like toothpicks. The leash trailed from her fingers. Supposedly, she was teaching Edward to walk right. Instead she went on talking about her schooldays.
“Some of my teachers told me I should go to college,” she said. “This one in particular, well she wasn’t a teacher but a librarian. I worked in the library for her, shelving books and things; she said, ‘Muriel, why don’t you go on to Towson State?’ But I don’t know . . . and now I tell my sister, ‘You be thinking of college, hear? Don’t drop out like I dropped out.’ I’ve got this little sister? Claire? Her hair never turned. She’s blond as an angel. Here’s what’s funny, though: she couldn’t care less. Braids her hair back any old how to keep it out of her eyes. Wears raggy jeans and forgets to shave her legs. Doesn’t it always work that way? My folks believe she’s wonderful. She’s the good one and I’m the bad one. It’s not her fault, though; I don’t blame Claire. People just get fixed in these certain frames of other people’s opinions, don’t you find that’s true? Claire was always Mary in the Nativity Scene at Christmas. Boys in her grade school were always proposing, but there I was in high school and no one proposed to me, I can tell you. Aren’t high school boys just so frustrating? I mean they’d invite me out and all, like to drive-in movies and things, and they’d act so tense and secret, sneaking one arm around my shoulder inch by inch like they thought I wouldn’t notice and then dropping a hand down, you know how they do, lower and lower while all the time staring straight ahead at the movie like it was the most fascinating spectacle they’d ever seen in their lives. You just had to feel sorry for them. But then Monday morning there they were like nothing had taken place, real boisterous and horsing around with their friends and nudging each other when I walked past but not so much as saying hello to me. You think that didn’t hurt my feelings? Not one boy in all that time treated me like a steady girlfriend. They’d ask me out on Saturday night and expect me to be so nice to them, but you think they ever ate lunch with me next Monday in the school cafeteria, or walked me from class to class?”
She glanced down at Edward. Abruptly, she slapped her hip; her black vinyl raincoat made a buckling sound. “That’s the ‘heel’ command,” she told Macon. She started walking. Edward followed uncertainly. Macon stayed behind. It ha
d been hard enough getting down the front porch steps.
“He’s supposed to match his pace to anything,” she called back. “Slow, fast, anything I do.” She speeded up. When Edward crossed in front of her, she walked right into him. When he dawdled, she yanked his leash. She tip-tapped briskly eastward, her coat a stiff, swaying triangle beneath the smaller triangle of her hair blowing back. Macon waited, ankle-deep in wet leaves.
On the return trip, Edward kept close to Muriel’s left side. “I think he’s got the hang of it,” she called. She arrived in front of Macon and offered him the leash. “Now you.”
He attempted to slap his hip—which was difficult, on crutches. Then he set off. He was agonizingly slow and Edward kept pulling ahead. “Yank that leash!” Muriel said, clicking along behind. “He knows what he’s supposed to do. Contrary thing.”
Edward fell into step, finally, although he gazed off in a bored, lofty way. “Don’t forget to cluck,” Muriel said. “Every little minute, you have to praise him.” Her heels made a scraping sound behind them. “Once I worked with this dog that had never in her life been housebroken. Two years old and not one bit housebroken and the owners were losing their minds. First I can’t figure it out; then it comes to me. That dog thought she wasn’t supposed to piddle anyplace, not indoors or outdoors, either one. See, no one had ever praised her when she did it right. Did you ever hear of such a thing? I had to catch her peeing outdoors which wasn’t easy, believe me, because she was all the time ashamed and trying to hide it, and then I praised her to bits and after a while she caught on.”
They reached the corner. “Now, when you stop, he has to sit,” she said.
“But how will I practice?” Macon asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I’m on these crutches.”
“So? It’s good exercise for your leg,” she said. She didn’t ask how the leg had been broken. Come to think of it, there was something impervious about her, in spite of all her interest in his private life. She said, “Practice lots, ten minutes a session.”
“Ten minutes!”
