Still Life With Bread Crumbs: A Novel

by Anna Quindlen

  Rebecca doesn’t know what Sonya is exactly. It’s a two-bedroom apartment. Is it possible that her father and Sonya sleep together? Is it possible they always have? Should she care? Her parents had separate bedrooms. Her father’s was small and hunter green, her mother’s enormous and aqua blue. “He snores,” Bebe said. “He should have had his adenoids removed as a child. It’s too late now.”

  “I have to get over there to see your mother one of these days,” Oscar said, pointing at Rebecca’s cookies and then at his mouth. He winked, his pale eyes large and opaque. For his entire life her father had worn glasses, only the style changing with fashion: round wire rims when he was a boy, black plastic frames as a young married, then those enormous fishbowls that came with disco and leisure suits. When had he stopped wearing them? Rebecca wondered what he saw now, whether Sonya looked beautiful, his daughter ageless, the apartment spacious, elegant.

  She passed him a cookie and he popped it whole into his mouth. “Were you born in a barn?” her mother would say to him when Rebecca was a child about his table manners. “Kings County Hospital, charity ward!” he would reply triumphantly. “I can’t understand why anyone would boast about that,” her mother would say, waving her hand.

  “Sonya!” he called. “I have to get over to see Mrs. Winter one of these days!”

  Rebecca was not sure, but she thought she heard a grunt from the kitchen.

  In the hallway she looked at the painting above the big antique desk at which her father had once gone over the account ledgers when he brought work home. Rebecca hoped that no one in Sonya’s large tendentious Polish family knew the painting was a Mary Cassatt. A minor Mary Cassatt, but still worth something. Bebe’s father had given it to his daughter as a wedding gift. Not to her and his new son-in-law, but to her alone. A lawyer had said several years before that Oscar could sell it if he had his wife declared incompetent.

  “The fellow doesn’t know your mother,” her father had said. “Incompetent! She’d murder me!”

  “Papa, she doesn’t even know who we are anymore.”

  “Doesn’t matter! She’d murder us both in our beds.”

  “Is it insured?” Rebecca had once asked, looking at the painting.

  “What do you think?” her father had replied. She thought that she had no idea.

  She leaned closer. It was a watercolor, and it had been hung out of the light, protected with the proper glass. Thank God for small favors.

  Sonya came out of the kitchen wiping her hands on an ancient dish towel. She was wearing pale blue pants and a matching tunic. When she first came to work for the Winters, she wore a dress version of the same thing: pale blue one week, mint green the next, yellow the week after that. The dresses had zippers up the front. The pants she wears now have elastic waistbands. Sonya wears a uniform that she can credibly say is not a uniform.

  Together the two looked at the painting, of a young woman gazing at her baby daughter, her face alight, the child’s hand reaching toward her. Sonya seemed uninterested. “Come again soon,” she said at the door. Her shoes are white, like those of a nurse. They always have been.

  “You made my day!” her father called, and then there was a click as the television went on.

  THE DOG ARRIVES, AND LEAVES AGAIN

  While Rebecca was on the thruway driving—speeding, fleeing—from the northern reaches of New York City, stopping at a farm stand for corn, tomatoes, and some beans, a dog wandered into her yard and sniffed the foundation of the cottage. He made his way from the front door, which was faintly redolent of soup of some sort, around to the back steps, where a crumb from a muffin Rebecca had eaten before leaving home, eaten standing in the doorway while peering into the woods for the source of some unaccustomed snapping sounds, lingered in the grass. A family of ants were beneath the crumb, preparing to hoist and carry, but the dog preempted their effort. In the process he ate not just the crumb but two of the ants. He wasn’t picky.

  His nominal owner was haphazard about feeding him—haphazard, in fact, about almost everything. One day a can of tuna and half a hot dog roll, the next day nothing. One day extravagant petting and ear scratching, the next a complete absence of any attention at all or even, on occasion, a thrown pillow or a kick, easily evaded. The dog had cycled through several houses in the four years since he’d been born in a shed near the county line, the result of a liaison between a mother mostly coonhound and Labrador and a father part golden retriever and part German shepherd. The result was the kind of scruffy shaggy sand-colored dog with aggressive eyebrows and curling tail that occasionally appears in movies or sitcoms as comic relief but that people in the country usually keep for some specific and unsentimental task.

  The first place he had lived was a ramshackle split-level house where a pair of high school sweethearts were cooking meth and needed a guard dog to make sure neither their competitors nor the cops rolled up on them suddenly. They kept the dog on the end of a chain bolted to one side of the garage, and during the winter he barked all day because he was so cold. It was his good luck that one night when the temperature was near zero the chain froze and snapped, and he ran free into the blackness with five links clanking on the asphalt between his front paws.

  A school bus driver picked him up on his way back from the morning run to the middle school and took him to the shelter, where he was one cage of cute puppies away from death by lethal injection when he was adopted by a home health aide whose elderly father was recovering from prostate surgery and needed company. It was a nice warm house, but the old man mainly nodded off on the couch while the TV shouted in the background, and a dog’s gotta do what a dog’s gotta do, and when he did it one time too many the woman took him back to the shelter. “The hell he’s housebroken,” she snarled at the front desk clerk, and the dog tucked his tail and ducked his head as he was led back, a recidivist.

  Two days later he walked out with a man who said he wanted a family pet—the dog’s file card still said housebroken, which was accurate if he was in a house in which anyone ever opened the door more often than every twelve hours—but who really wanted a dog to hunt with. He’d moved to the area from the suburbs, and he didn’t know anything about hunting, much less hunting dogs, or he would have known the dog was a bad candidate: the golden retriever part with no aggression, the shepherd part with too much. Coonhound and Labrador only went so far, watered down, and the dog was afraid of the gun, and the first time the man attempted, unsuccessfully, to bring down a duck, the dog took off into the woods and ran until he felt as though the beating of his heart and the throb of his blood would make his chest explode. When he arrived at a tricked-out trailer, its white siding and black shutters and foundation latticework giving it the illusion of a small house if the light was fading, he merely dropped to the grass and, panting hard, fell asleep.

  It made sense that the woman who lived there thought he was her dog, given her mental state; it made sense that he was agnostic about the whole thing, given his history. Maybe he was home, maybe not. It would depend on how inconsistent meals became, how often he got kicked, whether the door was locked on too many cold nights, or whether he got to curl up on one corner of the couch, the one with a pillow that smelled of coconut oil and perspiration. He didn’t ask much because he’d been accustomed to getting very little, and he’d learned not to commit until he was clear on the conditions. Which was why he’d followed a series of faint scents—warm human, toasted bread, ripe cheese, bird droppings, deer droppings, bear droppings—up the hill to the cottage. It happened that his nose was several thousand times sharper than that of a human, which had made living downwind of a meth kitchen torture even before the cold came. He could pick up the faint lingering aroma of the long-dead raccoon and even a hint of gun residue that made him skittish. The smell that calmed him but that he couldn’t name was the smell of warm peaches in a bowl on the table mingled with a leftover scone.

  Rebecca would have told you she was not a dog person, although if she had tol
d that to anyone in town, except for the city couples who came only on weekends, they would not have known what she meant. Having a dog in the country didn’t require much of an investment, financial or emotional: a clothesline, a twenty-pound bag of no-name food, a doghouse elevated enough so that not too much snow got inside. The locals were pragmatic about their animals in a way the city people found callous. Some couple from Tribeca would be sitting in the animal clinic waiting room with a feral cat they intended to take home after it was dewormed, declawed, vaccinated, and neutered—after it was purged of much of its essential catness—and the vet tech would come out and say to the man slumped across from them, zipping and unzipping an old waxed jacket, “Mr. Jensen, Rufus broke that leg in two places and it’s going to be upwards of six hundred dollars to fix it.” And Mr. Jensen would turn his wool cap in his hands and think about the gutters, the gas prices, and the lack of seasonal work and say sadly, “I guess you’ll just have to put him down.” Some of the country people took the dog home and put him down themselves, coming up behind with a .22. It was cheaper than the injection. Then they went to the shelter and got another dog. Often they gave it the same name as the old one, just to make things simpler.

  It was different in the city, which was why Rebecca didn’t think of herself as a dog person. Growing up in a building with lots of older people, she had known two sorts of women: the ones whose faces folded in upon themselves at the sight of a dog, particularly in the lobby, who fought to have dogs consigned to the service elevator, who pressed into a corner or wouldn’t get onto the elevator with one, particularly those Alsatians, terrifying. And then there were the ones who had dogs and were, frankly, nuts. They dressed their dogs in plaid coats, talked to them in high-pitched baby talk, referred to themselves as Ginger’s or Poppy’s mommy. The woman in the apartment next to her parents had a line of brass urns on the living room mantel, each containing the ashes of a Pekingese. After she died and her children emptied the apartment they were still there and the super put them in a box and then in the dumpster.

  Even when Rebecca had a son, who in the manner of children the world over asked for a pet incessantly, I’ll take care of it, I will, please please please, circumstances dictated that Rebecca would not have a dog because Peter was allergic. When she visited England the first time with him she realized that this was so aberrational there as to be shameful, and that Peter’s father had dealt with it by always having a pair of buff-colored Labradors and telling his son that he simply needed to get on with it. In this way Peter had gotten the nickname Wheezy at school; this, too, she discovered on that trip, when virtually all his old friends called him by that name. It made her look at him in a different way and be very solicitous for a time, until finally on the train back to London he had said, “Is there any particular reason you’ve chosen this moment to behave as though I am terminally ill?” Kindness only made Peter harsh.

  Of course by the time Ben was six Peter was off to the next woman, the new family, but somehow the dog issue had soon vanished for her son, replaced by demands for video games and computer equipment. On a bitter winter morning Rebecca was happy to sit at the table with a cup of coffee and the newspapers and not have to gird herself with boots and scarves to pull a recalcitrant terrier along the curb and remove her gloves to stoop and pick up after him with a plastic bag.

  No one had ever picked up after this dog. It could be argued that it was the other way around, that he cleaned up the messes of people, that when the old man spilled milk down the sides of the kitchen cabinets or dropped cereal on the floor, or when the woman in the white house let the garbage get away from her and slide from the can, he had cleaned up after them. His were transactional relationships; he gave as good as he got, maybe better. Maybe much better. It had been a bad couple of weeks in the little white house, and his haunches jutted sharply from the sandy fur above his tail, his midsection a big concave bowl when he preferred it with a little heft.

  “Jack!” a voice called from below, and the dog’s ears rose into sharp triangles. “Jack, come. Come.” That’s what he was called, at least for now. He took his time going down a deer trail, raising his leg against a spindly pine where a fox had done the same thing the day before. He raised his nose to the sky, thought he smelled an open can of cat food. This one bought cat food as often as she bought dog food, but he didn’t care as long as there was food, and the heat in the house worked.

  In a way it was too bad that he’d vanished by the time Rebecca pulled her car into the gravel place to one side of the cottage. She could have used the distraction. “I will see you again soon,” she had said to the attendant at the nursing home, and “I hope so,” the woman had replied, but they both knew it wasn’t true. Rebecca had noticed that her intention to visit her parents was in direct proportion to her distance from them in both time and space. The pink of her mother’s scalp through the flossy white hair, the box of adult diapers in her father’s bathroom. And the fear that someday she herself would be slumped in a plastic chair, lifting a calculator or an old cellphone to her face, an imaginary camera.

  “She thinks she’s a photographer, that one,” an aide would say, calling her honey or dear or sweetheart that way they did that was supposed to be nice but wasn’t. Or maybe if she was very lucky, one of them would say, “Somebody told me she used to be a famous photographer.” There was a Filipino woman who did occupational therapy at the Jewish Home and whom she’d heard whispering about her mother, “Very famous concert pianist.” She wanted to tell her not to whisper. Bebe would be thrilled if such a remark penetrated her conscious mind.

  Rebecca got out of the car with the peculiar empty feeling that she often had instead of sadness, as though her body knew that it was better to feel nothing at all rather than the something her mother’s playing and her father’s jollity and her fading bank balance evoked. She was ashamed, too, because all she could think of was having a long shower standing in the stained tub, washing off the smell she always felt crept into her clothes and her hair during these trips, the sweetish smell of old people, a combination of clothes that needed washing and some attar of starchy food and medicinal ointments. In the nursing home it was overlaid with the smell of disinfectant and it was almost blotted out in her father’s apartment by Sonya’s sponge baths—the specifics of which she didn’t like to think about too much—and one of those laundry detergents with a name like Mountain Spring or Autumn Rain. But the smell was still there and she could smell it long after she’d left. With her foot on the gas she felt she was trying to outrun it, and her parents, and her fears for her future—what would happen to them, what would happen to her. She vowed to return only when she could return properly, to her own apartment and a more permanent work arrangement, whatever that might be. At night she found herself imagining managing a coffee shop, raising money for a hospital, anything with a regular paycheck. An office. She had never worked in a real office.

  By the time she arrived back at the house—she still didn’t call it home—she was like a wine bottle with nothing inside but a few grainy dregs, a woman who rarely wept although she knew she would have been better for it. The dog might have cheered her, or at least taken her mind off her father, her mother, the money. But perhaps she wouldn’t have noticed him properly, not tired and depleted as she was that evening. Perhaps she wouldn’t have noticed the way his black eyes shone from beneath his caterpillar brows, the way his ears lifted when a deer sneezed somewhere out in the forest. Who knows how it all would have turned out if the dog hadn’t heard the cry from down below and answered it, hoping for food? Sometimes things have to come when you’re ready for them. Rebecca Winter knew that well, was about to learn it even better.

  ENTER TAD, A BIG FAN

  One morning in September, just like that, there was an additional $380 in her account. It must have come from a permission to reprint one of her photographs, perhaps the combined royalties on the two books. It was an amount that would have seemed negligible years before bu
t now felt like a windfall. It was a warm day, with a faint breeze, and suddenly everything seemed promising. She would spend some of the money at the grocery store, then make soup and stockpile it in the narrow freezer, narrowed further by the crusty ice on its walls. Maybe she would even defrost the freezer while she was making the soup.

  “That’s Tad,” Sarah whispered as she put a pumpkin scone in front of her at Tea for Two. “He’s a clown.”

  “I can see that,” Rebecca said.

  “No, like a real clown. A professional.”

  “I can see that.”

  Big black shoes with curling toes, a one-piece suit part polka dots, part stripes and stars. A curly red wig, ersatz Orphan Annie, with a hint of dark hair at the nape of the neck. And the obligatory white face paint and scarlet nose. Tad looked as though he was ready for work.

  “May I have six scones, Sarah?” he said. “Assorted?”

  “Anything to drink?”

  “No, thanks. Make it a dozen scones. Or, no, what about six scones, two black-and-white cookies, and two walnut Danish?”

  “I’m out of Danish.”

  “What about six scones, the black-and-white cookies, and some croissants?”

  Rebecca looked down at her computer screen, studying the cross photographs, trophy, yearbook, ribbon, birthday card. There were commonplace customs detailed in the local paper that she found strange and inexplicable: seasonal corn mazes, decorated stroller parades, clog dancing. In the beginning she had tried to convince herself that the crosses were a local tradition of some sort, but she couldn’t imagine what sort that might be. Perhaps if she saw Jim Bates she would ask him. Sarah said he knew everything.

  “Oh, maybe I’ll have a hot chocolate, too,” the clown said. “But no whipped cream. Or just a tad.”

  “A tad,” Sarah said. “Ha ha. I get it.”