The Dogs of Littlefield

by Suzanne Berne

  Stepping back from the microphone, she plunged a hand into the satchel slung over her shoulder and brought up a handful of yellow buttons, which she passed around: KIDS ARE FOR PEOPLE WHO CAN’T HAVE DOGS.

  Absurd, Mrs Beale muttered to herself, shocked to see how many people reached for the buttons. It was getting very warm in the meeting hall; she loosened the knot of her Liberty scarf.

  She had begun to lose track of the speakers when a small man in a teal-blue suit, a knobby-faced fellow with a dark goatee, introduced himself as Mr Eric Dibler. A strange look to him, both seedy and superior; he reminded her of a hillbilly preacher. In a mechanical voice, Mr Dibler explained that he had a master’s degree in environmental science and had conducted a study of dog waste in the park. After exhaustive calculations, he estimated that three tons of canine ‘sewage’ was being deposited there every year based on the number of dogs per capita in Littlefield, at the moment roughly point six. He spoke of ‘contaminants’. He referred to dogs as ‘producers’. He frequently wetted his lips with his tongue, his mechanical voice becoming strangely mesmerizing, so that Mrs Beale found herself both embarrassed and enthralled, waiting to hear what he would say next.

  At last he stopped speaking and gave a motoric twitch that shook his entire body before moving aside for the next speaker. Then he changed his mind and pitched back toward the microphone.

  ‘And for your information,’ he shrieked, almost knocking the microphone out of its stand, ‘KRAP is PARK spelled backwards.’

  ‘All right, all right.’ The chief alderman waggled his black eyebrows. ‘Thank you very much. Next.’

  She was really beginning to feel hot standing in the aisle under the fluorescent lights of the hall. Her feet hurt. She should never have worn her black shoes with the Cuban heels, but she had wanted to dress respectably for this evening. A shame that no one in line was well-mannered enough to recognize that an elderly woman should be allowed to move up to the front.

  A woman testified that she would like to see a leash law for cats, to keep them from killing birds in her yard. Then it was George’s turn. He spoke in defense of dogs that, like humans, needed a chance once in a while to be free. The pursuit of happiness should be a dog’s right, too. After the grating tones of Mr Dibler, George’s voice sounded deep and even as he described how he had raised his dog, Feldman, from a puppy and how Feldman used to greet him whenever he came home, his whole body wriggling with joy. Happy to wait for him in the car, sitting right behind the steering wheel. Happy to sit on the couch to watch TV. Happy just to be alive. That was what it was like to have a dog. They reminded you of the basic joy of being alive, which, God knows, was easy to forget.

  ‘Dogs are dying out there,’ he said. ‘For no other reason than somebody’s sick fantasy of what a park should be like. Is this the kind of town we want for our children? Do we want to be driven by fear, not even knowing who we’re afraid of?’

  Several people stood to applaud. ‘Who’s sick?’ Steven Karpinski could be heard asking. Mrs Beale felt light-headed and found herself squinting as if through smoke.

  Alicia Rabb, her neighbor from two doors down, took command of the microphone. Alicia was small and sharp-featured, with black spiky eyes and a blonde pageboy; she was given to what Mrs Beale thought of as ‘ethnic accessories’. Tonight she wore a white chinchilla vest over her turtleneck, tight denim pants and long feather earrings. Alicia leaned too close to the microphone and, through a painful squeal of feedback, said that because of the poisonings, her children were afraid to visit the park, which was why, after a lot of soul-searching, she had decided to support the ban on dogs.

  ‘Children have a right to their games,’ her quavering voice boomed through the microphone. ‘They have a right to feel safe in the world and wonder at nature. Native Americans have a phrase for childhood, it’s the Time of Awe.’

  ‘Or the awful time,’ said a disrespectful person, quite audibly, from near the front row.

  It sounded like George. That was the sort of thing he would say. Mrs Beale was sure it was George. What a boor. A narcissist. Tina was right. Perfectly understandable why she’d left him. At that moment Mrs Beale was visited by an image of Tina splayed naked on a bed wearing her reading glasses, pointing instructively at the dark figure of a man poised above her. The nausea quivering in the pit of her stomach took a lurch.

  ‘We are all children in this world.’ Alicia turned and gave the hall a black spiky look. ‘Please.’ She turned back and took hold of the microphone with both hands. ‘Protect the park. Protect us all. Give our children back their childhoods.’

  Very moving, thought Mrs Beale faintly. She began to feel sorry for the Rabb children, until she remembered who they were: a pack of skinny blue-eyed youngsters with chaff-colored hair and scabby legs, who were often barefoot, regardless of the weather, and wore expressions of malevolent innocence that frightened even the postman. They threw pine cones at bicyclists riding by and squirted them with squirt guns, and one of them, the oldest boy, had been sent to counseling for something to do with a gerbil. Neighborhood cats avoided their yard. In September two of the Rabb girls ran through the neighborhood stealing flowers and ferns from people’s gardens, then tied them into sloppy bouquets to sell for five dollars each at the Harvest Fair – in some cases hawking flowers to the very people from whom they had stolen them – before being apprehended by Sybil, whose entire bed of dahlias had been decimated.

  Alicia sat down, looking proud and saddened in her chinchilla vest. The two people in line ahead of Mrs Beale each spoke, both members of the Off-Leash Advisory Group, but she was too preoccupied with her own increasing physical discomfort to listen.

  ‘Have we had dinner?’ Steven Karpinski was asking.

  Mrs Beale was the final speaker.

  She gazed at the microphone with distaste. A long thrusting metal thing with a dark, globular foam knob.

  ‘Littlefield is being overrun by dogs,’ she heard herself say in a thready amplified voice, ‘and we seem to feel there is nothing we can do about it. That is why this terrible person is acting in such a dreadful fashion. But we can do something.’

  A good start. The crowd, which had grown restive after Alicia Rabb’s speech, now settled down and seemed to be listening. Her energy returning, she went on to outline her proposal for a general ban on dogs in the park, enumerating the various ways in which dogs had not behaved like good citizens in the past, pointing in particular to several occasions when the collective gardens had been ravaged. The latest offense,’ her voice was getting raspy, ‘is a large hole that was dug in a gardener’s pumpkin patch.’

  She caught sight of Mr Dibler’s stern knobby face; he was looking at his watch.

  ‘But I’ll tell you what I really mind,’ she said, and paused to breathe into the microphone. Her heart was thumping. What did she really mind? Aphids. Tina’s unwashed wine glass. The mothball smell of Sybil’s raccoon coat. Those unopened packages of her husband’s shirts and the thought of moving someplace smaller one of these days.

  George’s great pale slavering dog appeared before her: that dog, sitting in the front seat of George’s car behind the steering wheel.

  ‘What I really mind –’ she grasped the microphone stand with a trembling hand – ‘is the way dogs are being allowed to run things. A lot of very high and mighty people around here would tell you that dogs have as much right to the park as we do.’ She turned to glare at where she imagined George to be sitting. ‘But let me ask you, do dogs pay taxes?’

  Someone began to shout from the audience. Other people shouted back. She touched the knot of her scarf. Her feet ached in her Cuban heels and she really was very hot. She had said what needed to be said. Nothing more could be expected of her. She must sit down, and yet her chair was so far away and everyone seemed to be yelling. A roaring reached her as the combined voices of the audience swelled fiercely and incoherently, like the sound of waves breaking on rocks, and out of nowhere that dog came leaping,
white and enormous, its great red jaws opening wider and wider so that she could see all the way into its black gullet where there was nothing left for her in the world.

  The alderman with Brezhnevian eyebrows banged on his desk with his coffee mug, banging so hard the coffee mug broke and flew into pieces. George had appeared beside her and now offered his arm.

  ‘Allow me,’ he said, his breath wreathing her ear, smelling of olives. She clutched gratefully at his arm with both hands and allowed herself to be conducted back to her seat.

  Sybil was waving as if hailing a taxi. The black woman in the turban had moved over to give Mrs Beale her seat on the aisle; George said something friendly to the woman as he helped Mrs Beale sit down.

  ‘Are you sick?’ Steven Karpinski bellowed from the other side of Sybil. ‘You look like you ate a mouse.’

  ‘No, no,’ she said gruffly. ‘I am quite all right. Thank you,’ she tried to say to George, but he had already moved away and was heading back down the aisle.

  The hearing ended with the chief alderman declaring that they would consider both proposals, for a dog park and for a dog ban, at their next meeting. Everyone gathered their coats. At the front of the room the tall, actorish alderman was speaking to Alicia Rabb, his hand on his chest as if reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.

  ‘Well, I hope we’ll all survive until then,’ said Mrs Beale aloud.

  ‘Do you think we will?’ The woman in the turban gave a gap-toothed smile.

  ‘I suppose.’ Mrs Beale felt dizzy again. ‘I don’t know.’ She closed her eyes. And yet it was true that when she opened them she found that she was still in her metal folding chair and everything was very much as it had been.

  9.

  Dr Watkins was making progress in getting to know the inhabitants of Littlefield, as she had written to Dr Awolowo. In addition to her observations of the Downing family, she had met quite a few residents at hearings at the town hall, which she attended weekly, including hearings on the school budget and most recently at a hearing on what was now referred to as ‘the situation’ at the park. As a result of attending so many hearings, she had been invited to join a Save the Park task force and to attend a planning meeting of Celebrate Your Heritage Day (‘We’re especially interested in tribal cuisine,’ the chairwoman told her. ‘Any favorite dishes you might like to prepare?’). Most recently she had accompanied Margaret Downing to a cocktail party reception at the home of Dr Naomi Melman, who lived in a brown-shingled Dutch colonial behind an octopus-like forsythia bush on Ballard Street.

  For the last four years Dr Melman, a family therapist at the Jewish Community Center, had given a popular once-a-month lecture on improving personal happiness, advertised in the Community Center Bulletin as the Live & Love series. These lectures had just been collected in a self-published book with a matte pink cover titled The Bright Side: Feeling Better About Bad Things, the letters picked out in scarlet, available at each lecture, $10.95 apiece, and on sale at the reception, twenty percent of the proceeds going to Walk for a Cure. A young woman in a trim black caterer’s uniform that buttoned down the back took guests’ coats as they entered the house. A crowd of well-wishers and friends pressed into the dining room, where Dr Melman sat at a table covered with a pink cloth and stacked with her books. She had a short wedge of black frizzy hair and a long, sallow face that appeared and disappeared as she signed copies of her book and accepted personal checks, each time dropping them into what looked like a metal tackle box and closing it with a snap.

  When Dr Watkins held out her copy to be signed, Dr Melman looked up briefly and gave her a thin-lipped smile. ‘Life is Good,’ she wrote across the title page. ‘Cheers, Naomi.’

  The living room was decorated with pink balloons and six small, round, pink-draped tables; pink pillar candles flickered on each table set with a bouquet of small pink roses and sparkly pink swizzle sticks, plastic champagne glasses, a bottle of pink champagne and a tray of crackers topped with salmon paste. Margaret had found two seats at a table with a broad-faced social worker named Sharon, who had a pink blaze in the front of her short gray hair.

  Sharon began talking about town budget cuts as soon as they sat down, especially cuts to the elementary school budget which had wiped out all kindergarten field trips along with the third-grade recorder concert. ‘I usually do look on the bright side,’ she insisted, making the flame of the pillar candle sputter. But it was getting impossible these days. So much wasteful spending. Take, for instance, the lavish new high school and the school superintendent’s exorbitant salary. And look at the epidemic of pulled fire alarms at the middle school – six hundred bucks every time the fire department had to be dispatched, because some kid wanted to get out of a math test.

  ‘But what if that’s not it?’ Margaret was toying with the candle, dipping a swizzle stick into the pooling wax surrounding the wick. She’d drunk two glasses of champagne while Sharon was talking and now her hand seemed a little unsteady. ‘What if they’re pulling alarms because they really are alarmed about something? Kids are like dogs with earthquakes. Isn’t that true? They can sense something’s wrong without knowing what –’

  Just then her swizzle stick caught on fire, blazing up with an acrid stink and almost singeing her fingers before Sharon doused it with what was left in the champagne bottle.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Margaret, looking at her fingers. ‘I don’t know what I was thinking.’

  Added to these concerns, the weather. Cold weather had arrived in New England earlier than usual. A few nights after Dr Melman’s reception, a storm rushed through the village, hurling rain against windows like handfuls of gravel; the next morning almost every yard was covered in a sodden half-frozen mat of brown leaves. What leaves remained on tree branches rattled in the breeze with a ghostly papery sound in the evenings when Dr Watkins walked Aggie down Rutherford Road toward the village after dinner, peering into the lit windows of houses as she passed by. Such unremarkable houses during the day, sunlight falling flatly against painted front doors, raked lawns, empty driveways. But at night the same houses floated behind their shadowy shrubs and walkways, hushed, battened, as mysterious and provisional as ships moored in a dark harbor.

  Sinister shapes loomed up at her only to be revealed the next morning as rhododendron bushes, garden sheds, bicycles. Why were the suburbs felt to be safe? They seemed more unsettling, at least at night, than any Chicago neighborhood, where at least there were streetlights. Never trust a place without sidewalks, her mother always said.

  One night she passed a parked car and there was Margaret Downing, kissing a man who was not her husband.

  The following week, out with Aggie later than usual after typing up her notes, Dr Watkins spotted Bill Downing in a dark overcoat and a black wool cap on Ballard Street.

  He was standing in the street with his big black dog, in front of the Melman house. Standing just beyond the reach of yellow light thrown by the Melmans’ windows, but his face was visible to Dr Watkins as she approached in the darkness – and on it she perceived a look of such monstrous suffering, as if it were not a man who stood there, but something that had consumed the man and now occupied his body. It was a look of wooden self-consciousness, fraudulence, vacancy, a kind of flat-line anguish that was almost frightening. Even when he turned, startled, to say good evening to her, that look did not quite leave his face.

  10.

  He recognized her from his mornings at the park: the owner of Boris the sheepdog. She was standing with a little boy on the sidewalk outside of the Forge Café, the dog with them. George stopped to pat Boris’s shaggy head, wondering, as people always do with English sheepdogs, how Boris could see anything.

  He straightened up, smiling guiltily. She smiled back, understandingly.

  ‘Emily.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  Christmas lights were already blinking from a few store windows though it was still a week before Thanksgiving. A cardboard turkey with a burnt-orange accordion-pleated t
ail had replaced the basket of daisies atop the anvil in the café’s window. Soon enough the turkey itself would be replaced by a white plastic Christmas tree sprayed with glitter and decorated with frayed green and red silk balls, but for now the turkey kept a beady vigil as passers-by walked back and forth on their way home or out on errands. Door chimes tinkled as people went in and out of shops, while in the distance rattled the trolley. It was just past four thirty but already the trolley lights were on and shop windows were lit, the sky had a dull rosy-amber tint above the rooftops and the air smelled fresh and cold and watery, as it does just before snow. Here and there the sidewalks were rimed with ice.

  Emily wore a long black wool coat that blew about the tops of her black boots; long blonde curls blew about her face and small pink nose, catching on her little round gold-rimmed glasses.

  ‘And this is my son,’ she was saying, ‘Nicholas.’

  Nicholas was in a red parka, a red fireman’s hat and blue sweatpants tucked into a pair of yellow rubber boots. ‘Ready for any emergency,’ said Emily. ‘Right, Nicky?’ Nicholas nodded solemnly.

  ‘And where are you off to, George?’

  He was on his way to meet Margaret for coffee at the Forge. She had requested this meeting. Her email had read: We should talk. One of the worst sentences in the English language, in his opinion. Second only to: Who do you think you are? Always followed by what someone else thought you were, rarely a happy definition.

  He hadn’t seen her since the evening of the town hall hearing, when she’d thrown herself at him in his car. He had kissed her back. They’d sat kissing in his car at the bottom of her driveway for maybe five minutes. He tried to be muscular and commanding with his tongue, as he imagined her investment-planner husband must be. Then they broke apart and drove to the town hall in silence. She was trembling hard, pulling at the fingertips of her leather gloves. He figured she felt guilty about kissing him, and after the hearing, as he drove her home, he resolved to let her make the next move. In the car she began talking in an unnaturally high voice, reviewing what had been said at the hearing, and marveling at how, after so much discussion and event, nothing had been accomplished. It had started to rain.