18
Before the move, I had visions, dreams maybe, of working a day or two a week from my home study or, even better, from the table on our back porch, typing up a column in the summertime sun amid the sounds of chirping birds and the beauty of so many blossoming flowers. In that dream, there were in fact animals, but they had fur and four legs and were lying at my feet, softly snoring in the summery breeze.
Two or three days out in suburbia, I set out to make the dream a reality. Pam was at her clinic. The kids were in their last week of school. I pulled my laptop out onto the back deck, grabbed my trademark legal pad filled with notes from recent interviews, and began to write my next column. Buddy happened to be on the front porch, crowing his little brains out, much of the sound blocked out by the house mercifully standing between us.
Okay, this was working. As I typed, I paused to watch butterflies flutter in the nearby arborvitaes. The scent was of freshly mown grass. The sun was warm, the breeze was gentle, and the creativity flowed freely from my brain to my fingers. Maybe, I told myself, this suburban thing would work after all. I used to try to write from my front stoop, but the city street, the whole active urban world, would almost always overwhelm my thoughts.
Buddy, of course, kept crowing in the distance, though the source of the noise slowly shifted from directly in front of the house to the front side of the house, steadily moving in the way you can track the movement of a faraway fire engine siren on an otherwise silent night, gradually, subtly, until it’s nearby and blaring at you. He was now on the side of the house and quickly coming toward the back, louder, and louder still.
Suddenly he turned the corner. I could not only hear him as clear as cannon fire but also see his white, blubbery body with its red comb bobbing and twitching as he walked straight across the grass and toward the deck where I sat, crowing all the while. He hopped up the two steps, still screaming.
“Buddy,” I told him, “for chrissakes, pipe down. There’s nothing to be afraid about.”
Shockingly, he didn’t take my advice. What he did was walk straight toward me, methodically, a bird on a mission, his beady little eyes just about popping out the sides of his narrow head. About ten feet out, the length of a putt I would have been delighted to make, he made a long, angry, guttural sound and charged my leg.
I leaped to my feet yelling “Jesus Christ!” The dogs were laying in the grass nearby, too lazy, surprised, or frightened to come to my defense. I was up just in the nick of time, positioning the chair between me and the bird, but he was a determined little creature.
He did a two-step sidestep around the chair, which I kept between us like a lion tamer. He kept walking; I kept turning. He was squawking; I was telling him to calm the hell down. We continued to circle each other. I finally found myself with a clear shot at the back door, the chair still between me and Buddy, so I put it down and ran for my life. He came scampering after me, fluttering a couple of feet off the ground to try to get up speed. I flung open the screen door, slipped inside, and slammed it shut on Buddy’s beak. He stood in the doorway, screeching threats until I shut the main door in his face, and then he continued to scream some more. That was the first and last time I tried to work outside.
I should have known I was being too ambitious, but exhaustion might have been getting the best of me. Every morning began at about 4:30 with Buddy breaking into a crowing regimen from his rooster house, which still didn’t have windows because they were special-ordered and hadn’t yet arrived. So every morning I would bolt upright. Every morning Pam would scramble out of bed, trek across the lawn, grab Buddy, and carry him to the basement. Every morning he’d start crowing from downstairs at about 5:30 A.M., usually right as I had miraculously fallen back to sleep. Say this about that bird, his timing was impeccable.
Once he started crowing at 5:30, he basically never stopped. He would pause while the kids came downstairs to eat breakfast before school, clucking around the kitchen floor, high-stepping between two wary dogs, who threw me looks that demanded, What the hell kind of barn are we living in? You know things are bad when your golden retriever questions the civility of where he lives. But when it was time for Buddy to go outside, he started it up all over again, volcanic, relentless cock-a-doodle-doos that never had an end. Just on and on, the next one louder than the one before. The rare times he took a break, usually to get a drink of water because his little beak had apparently dried out from screeching, the sound still echoed around my head. If I wasn’t listening to him crow, I was hearing the residue or girding to hear it again.
And he wasn’t just loud but ornery, and not a little bit ornery but your basic beast on two skinny legs. As out of sorts as I was in the new house, Buddy was further gone. Most nights, he refused to put himself to bed in his new house, as he used to do in Pam’s garage. Instead he’d huddle in a corner of the front porch, protected by the overhang and taking solace in the knowledge that he was closer to his flock: Pam and her kids. Standing in the kitchen, I’d hear Pam, outside after dark, picking him up, cradling him in her arms, carrying him to the nest of blankets on a high shelf in his own house, telling him “Boo, I need you to get used to all this. I need you to calm down. You’re too good a rooster to be this upset.” He’d coo back as if he understood every word and meant to honor it, but the next day, the screaming started anew.
As far as I could tell, Buddy seemed to blame me for every ounce of his anxiety, and it wasn’t lost on me that I was basically blaming him for mine. He hated me. To be fair, he didn’t really understand the point of me. If he was already living on Sawmill Lane, the self-designated head of the flock, what was I doing around? What purpose did I serve? Sometimes, when the kids described it as “Mommy’s house” and marched off to bed with nary a good night, I wondered the same thing myself.
Buddy maintained his aggressive posture. He spent his days lurking around the front or back doors, defecating all over the porches in big, wide white-and-black circles that seemed to bother only me. And whenever I came and went, he would lunge, so that I was forced to roam my own homestead with a rolled-up newspaper jammed into my back pocket, or more often, clutched in my hands. Of the many reasons people had to love the Globe, warding off one’s pet rooster was probably a new one. He’d charge, I’d swat. He’d stagger backward, not so much intimidated as delighted to be engaged, and charge again. Swat. Jump. At some point he usually tumbled over backward, giving me enough time to make for the door. As I raced to freedom, I’d look up, and inevitably some driver going by would have slowed down right in front of the house to watch the entire encounter, man v. chicken, in shock and awe.
It’s not as though I had never been to a suburban restaurant before, though this was my first visit to a suburban restaurant as a full-fledged citizen of suburbia. It was a Friday night. It was late. Well, suburban late, meaning about 8 P.M. We were less than a week into our new house, and the kids were at their father’s for the weekend. Pam and I were exhausted when we walked into a restaurant that many people had raved about, even telling me it was as good as any steak house in Boston. The first thing I noticed was that there wasn’t a person under the age of forty in the place. Nobody. It was as if they had raised the drinking age by twenty years. It was a warm evening after a beautiful early summer’s day, so almost every stool at the long bar was taken by a man in a golf shirt and shorts fresh off the course—or not so fresh. The two bartenders, both men who had a few decades under their aprons, seemed to know every one of them by name.
A hostess who could not possibly have been any less enthusiastic about our arrival informed us that we could seat ourselves in the lounge, so we grabbed the only open high-top table near the bar. It was the first time in a long time that we’d had the chance to have a real, live, uninterrupted conversation, and I noticed that Pam had dark circles under her pretty eyes. I undoubtedly had the same thing, minus the pretty eyes part. How could we not?
“Are we supposed to order from the bar?” I asked after we’d been
sitting for ten minutes and nobody had come over.
“Somebody will come around,” Pam said, yawning.
Actually, many people had come around—waitresses and waiters and busboys and the hostess and I think the general manager, possibly the Joint Chiefs of Staff, all of whom had walked right by us without making any eye contact. A couple of times I had even put my hand out in a polite wave, but they had simply looked the other way. I glanced over at the bar and saw the two bartenders merrily chatting with all their regulars, refilling their wineglasses before even being asked and delivering thick cuts of steak bathed in various juices and sauces.
We talked about Buddy. Then we talked about the house and how nice it was, all that space, everything new, the fact the kids had settled in without a speck of hesitation.
“Excuse me, sir?” I said to a server who happened to be walking past. We’d probably been sitting thirty minutes now, and not a person had looked our way. There were guys at the bar who had ordered slow-cooked prime rib after we got there, and they were halfway done with their meals. The server brushed past me, said something to the effect of “I’ll send someone right over” and was gone. Apparently, “right over” didn’t mean “tonight.”
Pam said what I was thinking, which is good, because sometimes you sound like a jackass when you say these things yourself. “You’re not used to this, are you?”
I assumed she meant the poor service, the second-class treatment, the fact that I didn’t matter to a single person in the place besides, maybe, Pam.
“I don’t think I’m used to any of it yet,” I replied. She didn’t say anything and neither did I, until I realized that I didn’t want that to sound more ominous than I intended, so I asked, “Buddy will stop the crowing at some point, right?”
I swear to God, as I posed the question, I thought I could hear him crowing from the dining room; the sound was that ingrained inside the deepest channels of my mind. “He’s just getting used to things,” Pam said. “It’s different for him. We’re on a busier street. There’s more open space to deal with. His shed, unlike the garage, is away from the house, and I’m not so sure he likes that. I think he liked sleeping under the same roof as everyone else.”
It all made sense as she said it—across the open expanse of a completely empty table, void of drinks, of silverware, of menus, because nobody gave a flying damn that we were there.
At that moment a smiling gentleman in his full chef whites came striding around the bar in our direction, stopping to shake some hands with the regulars along the way. He looked jocular, tossing off one-liners that made people laugh, making motions toward their plates, everything light and easy. And here he came toward us, at us—past us. It took me back to the many nights when the chef of some very pleasant Boston restaurant would come out of a much nicer kitchen than this one specifically to see—well, there I go, sounding like a complete jackass. Never mind.
Pam, by the way, seemed to notice none of it, because she was either too tired or too immersed in her thoughts about God’s chosen rooster. “It’s a lot to get used to for Buddy, especially because he’s such a creature of habit,” she said.
Then she added, “You know, the two of you have more in common than you think.”
With that she slipped off her stool, tugged at my wrist, and said, “Let’s get out of here. I’ll buy you a pizza and we’ll take it home.”
“You’re assuming the pizza joint will take our order.”
On the way out, I noticed the chef with his arm around an elderly man at a table for six, everyone all smiles. I noticed so many waiters and waitresses pushing carts filled with big salads and grilled steaks across the hardwood floors to their destination. At the door, the nice hostess asked, “How was everything?”
“I’m going to tell every person I know about this place,” I said.
Pam stifled a laugh. The young woman gave us a big, self-satisfied smile, and we parted ways, never to see each other again.
19
I still never knew what I was going to get when I walked into the house, now my house, or partially my house, at the end of a day of work: ebullient kids who would gush about some discovery they had made that day or recite a funny line by their particularly funny friend, Claire, or silent, sullen kids who wanted nothing to do with anything related to me. I’d call Pam on the ride home and casually ask, “How are the kids?” She’d tell me, “Great.” And then I’d arrive and they wouldn’t so much as look up from their dog-training show on Animal Planet to grunt a simple “Hi.” Other times, Pam would tell me they were being monsters, and I’d find two adorable kids who would drape their legs over mine as I read them a book on the couch.
During one call, Pam cryptically warned me, and I quote, “Be prepared,” which I assumed meant that what awaited on the other end of my long commute was a pair of exhausted kids who would cover their heads with a blanket when I walked into the house. Instead, I got Abigail approaching me in the mudroom before I could even slide out of my jacket and saying with the sweetest smile and in a singsongy voice, “We need to talk.”
“Great,” I said. “Let’s talk. What about?”
She looked at me with her wide eyes, a smile spreading over her smooth face, and announced, “I want a kitten.”
I was proud of myself for not flinching, proud that the color didn’t drain from my face, proud that I didn’t roll into the fetal position and wail, “No mas, no mas, no more animals in this goddamned house!” I was proud because I had arrived at that point, up to my neck and beyond in the fur and feathers of too many creatures who brought me too little comfort, and I was about one more set of paws from completely cracking up.
Instead, I said, brightly and lightly, “And you know what I want? I want a camel. But the problem is, Abs, we already have more than a few animals in this house, and there’s really not a lot of room for any more.”
I spoke the truth. We had two dogs, Baker and Walter, Baker being the one I had brought into the household, Walter being Pam’s. After Harry died, I’d vowed I would never get another, at least not for a long time. I couldn’t take the heartbreak. Three months later, I couldn’t take the loneliness, couldn’t take the mornings without a long, leisurely walk, couldn’t take the nights coming home to an empty apartment, couldn’t take the fact that I probably laughed twenty fewer times a day because I didn’t have a dog. So I called down to Harry’s breeder and had them pick out a puppy from a similar lineage. Before I ever met him, I pitied the poor dog who would live in Harry’s shadow, always suffering by comparison. But Baker swaggered into my life without a care in the world. Brilliant? I sincerely expected to catch him on my computer playing video games whenever I got home early from work. He was stubborn. He was athletic. He was small, undoubtedly the runt of his litter, but carried himself large, unimpressed by almost everything going on around him that didn’t involve a ball. As a puppy, he had a bizarre fetish for scarves and gloves. More than a few times, some comely woman walking down a Back Bay street would lean down to rub Baker. She’d be cooing at him, when suddenly he’d have her scarf in his teeth, pulling, bringing her with it, the cloth tightening around her neck, her pleading for help.
He was also, to put it politely, a mouthy puppy, playfully biting everything in sight—bare hands, pant legs, once my nose. I couldn’t cure the habit, try as I did, so I called in a behaviorist, who showed me a remedy that basically involved violently yanking Baker’s scruff as the pup bit the trainer’s free hand. Two minutes in, the dog looking at us as if we were crazy, he was cured.
That trainer, Ray, a former member of the U.S. Marine Corps who carried himself as if he had just gotten out of Camp Lejeune, said, “This is one hyperaware little puppy. Let’s do some quick exercises.”
Baker learned to sit, quickly but skeptically. You could almost see him rolling his eyes at something this remedial. He had a harder time with “Lie down.” “It’s a more submissive posture,” Ray explained, pulling Baker’s two front paws out to force him d
own. “And this doesn’t seem to be a very submissive dog.”
Then we went outside to start the “Heel” command. Ray put a little training collar around Baker’s little neck, and Baker shot him a look that oozed indignation. He proceeded to sit on the sidewalk and refused to move. Ray waved treats in front of his nose. Baker ignored him. Ray started walking, saying “Heel!” in an upbeat voice, giving Baker’s collar a quick jerk. Baker lay down and refused to move. That continued for twenty minutes and resumed for the better part of an hour the next week. Normally I like to train my own dogs, but I was curious where this thing with Ray would end up. In fact, it ended up at the corner of Fairfield and Marlborough Streets in the Back Bay of Boston, when Ray handed me the leash to a puppy that had spent the last forty-five minutes sprawled across the pavement in protest, refusing to walk or even rise to his feet. “He’s untrainable,” Ray declared to me. “No charge for today.” When Ray happened to run into us about six months later, Baker padding happily beside me off leash, he looked on in amazement and asked, “How did you do it?”
“I just had to train him at his pace, not ours,” I explained.
Walter was pretty much the exact opposite, big, beautiful, and brainless, the Zoolander of the canine world. There was nothing there but the constant and urgent desire for unadulterated affection. He would lean in to perfect strangers, groaning as they stroked him. He liked everyone indiscriminately, except for me. Me he inexplicably loved, which meant he was constantly in my way or panting anxiously as I tried to read or write. Now that we were living together, he saw to it that we never spent a moment apart at home. It was my basic canine nightmare—a thoughtless, anxious, constant presence.
Buddy Page 19
