The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals

by Lauren Slater

  Author’s Note

  I have observed elsewhere that there is a significant difference between the truth of experience and the facts of everyday life. What I write about in these pages is often emotive, what I experienced, observed, and felt in different parts of my life. Some of the details I’ve forgotten (and occasionally I make note of that in the text, as with the date of a tragic fire in chapter 3), and some I’ve remembered, perhaps, imperfectly. So I may not have all the facts in perfect order, but I have no doubt about the truth of these stories.

  Books by Lauren Slater

  Blue Beyond Blue

  Opening Skinner’s Box

  Love Works Like This

  Lying

  Prozac Diary

  Welcome to My Country

  Edited by Lauren Slater

  The Complete Guide to Mental Health for Women

  The Best American Essays 2006

  Beacon Press

  25 Beacon Street

  Boston, Massachusetts 02108-2892

  www.beacon.org

  Beacon Press books are published under the auspices of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations.

  © 2012 by Lauren Slater

  All rights reserved

  Printed in the United States of America

  15 14 13 12 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Parts of some chapters in this book were previously published in different forms in Creative Nonfiction, Family Therapy Networker, O Magazine, Self, and Gulf Coast.

  This book is printed on acid-free paper that meets the uncoated paper ANSI/NISO specifications for permanence as revised in 1992.

  Text design by Ruth Maassen

  Some names of individuals, dates, and other identifying details mentioned in this book have been changed.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Slater, Lauren.

  The sixty thousand–dollar dog : my life with animals / Lauren Slater.

  p. cm.

  eISBN 978-0-8070-0188-2

  ISBN 978-0-8070-0187-5 (alk. paper)

  1. Slater, Lauren. 2. Human-animal relationships—United States. 3. Authors, American—21st century—Biography. 4. Psychologists—United States—Biography. I. Title.

  QL85.S55 2012

  590.92--dc23

  [B]

  2012020732

  For Evans Huber

  Contents

  1 The Egg

  2 Sugaring the Bit

  3 Old Homes

  4 The Swan with a Broken Beak

  5 The Sixty Thousand–Dollar Dog

  6 The Death of a Wasp

  7 Bat Dreams

  Acknowledgments

  1

  The Egg

  I grew up in a place called the Golden Ghetto, where people sang Hatikvah in the swept streets, celebrating another war won in the homeland. As children we were told our superior Jewish spirit would lift us up, if we were willing to try. Look around you, everyone said; see how wealthy we are? Back then I believed this, but now I see the story differently. I see rows of modest homes, the interiors often dim, with washed linoleum floors and heavy curtains hanging. On Fridays, at sundown, in the summertime, when the windows were lifted, we could hear sung prayers spooling through the air, the melodies merging with ours as we too blessed our bounty, tearing into the challa’s buttery braid. At the head of the table my father carved a kosher bird cooked in a garland of onions and coins of carrots flashing orange and floating in the broth. When I was eight years old I began to sense that the Golden Ghetto and our supposedly superior Jewish spirit were more wish than fact. I knew, for instance, that I could be kidnapped. I knew every bone was breakable. I put this information in some cut-off corner of my mind. What I wanted was a world I could wade in, some sort of perpetual summer. In such a season—the streets deserted in the heat, sun-drenched and silent—I could follow the path of an ant for hours, crouching on the baking curb while watching the insect zig and zag, the black bead of its body ascending a stem, then dropping into the open cup of a wayward poppy rooted in the cracked concrete.

  As I remember it, in those afternoons I was often alone on the street, at the peak of the summer heat, when people drew their blinds so the inside of almost every home was submerged in shadow, as if sunk to the bottom of the sea, the brilliant white light visible only as it seeped between the slatted blinds and spread across the sills like oil. Once the sun set, our neighbors emerged, the children in their pressed shorts, the women sitting on the stoops, a kerchief tied around the curlers in their hair, the husbands dragging the coiled hose from its reel and then the sudden spray drenching the parched ground, puddling on the scorched surface before slowly sinking in. For me, the ghetto’s gardens tell the story of this place, all the hedges trimmed, every flower staked and noosed at its neck. Our streets were spare, with hardly any trees, the town’s Holocaust survivors—and there were many, old and bent-backed—frightened by all that branching, seeing in a single sapling—(quickly yanked from its socket)—the huge forests they’d hid in, escaping Hitler’s grip. In those forests, they said, towering larches had crosshatched the sky, making scraping sounds when the wind blew. The ghetto’s grandparents had seen vipers living in the shadows cast by trees and had known animals with too many teeth use the yews for cover and for camouflage Our ninety-year-old neighbor, Mr. Eller, said he had seen people hung from low branches, their necks snapped in a second, the tongue taking longer to turn blue.

  Despite its stark seasons, its steeply silent Sabbaths, its sadness and its fear, the Golden Ghetto was good enough for a child. Some days, when the heat rose so high the black tar melted, we would stamp our hands into the streets, so when you looked out your window you saw your road smattered with palm prints, as if primates had been let loose in the night. On Fridays, Erev Shabbat, we all sang the same songs in synagogue; then we all went home to bless our fruits and eat our ruddy roasts, this kind of neighborhood communing unusual, perhaps priceless, and yet, it left me longing. I never said to myself, I am longing; that feeling lived at a level below language, but nevertheless I knew it because of how I saw things, my mother unloading the toppling market bags, pulling out packages of marbled meat, or the charged color of a wet carrot, my mother with her apron on, her blade whisking away the tough skin, the rind coming off in curls and fragrant shavings I collected in my cupped hands, lifting them to my nose and breathing in that wild and rustic tang.

  When I was young there was my world and then, as I grew, came thoughts of what was beyond us. At night, radio towers blinked on distant hills. I could hear from the environs of town the gunning of motors, the boom of a backfire. Sometimes late at night or early, early in the morning, when the summer mist lay like milk just above the grass, I heard my mother crying, and when I crept closer, I could see she always pressed a crumpled Kleenex to her mouth. Once she saw me see. She tossed her Kleenex in the trash and walked off, her high heels tapping on our polished floor. I wondered if her crying had to do with where we were, or where we weren’t. I didn’t know. I wasn’t sure. In sleep I sometimes heard, from far away, a lady knocking on a giant door, the door a mighty wedge of wood, her dress frothing around her feet, as snow fell. In the real world, the daytime world, the seasons switched, and the snow fell and fell and refused to stop, despite our expectations. Snow crept over our ground level windows and darkened the house. Snow turned the quotidian into a question mark, so the Ellers’ house next door, a house I’d seen every day of my eight years on earth, suddenly looked utterly unlike itself, fangs of ice hanging off the gutters, a pole snapped in half lying across their drowning roof. School closed for ten days and the roads were all impassable. As the shreds fell from the blank but spill
ing sky, I saw two policemen ride down our street on huge horses, the horses high stepping in the mounds and drifts. The horses were white and as they melted into the distance it seemed as if the animals became a part of the swirling storm, their massive bodies breaking up into flakes and dancing down the drafts of wind, a sight so beautiful, so foreign, so impossible I felt a kind of deep and wild want, but for what I couldn’t say.

  And then, just like that, the snow stopped. The sky cleared. Spring came. The clouds shook themselves out and, as if embarrassed by their excess, appeared against their common blue background all fleecy and preened. The winter had been long and wet, and it did something odd to the earth. The earth was juicer and darker than usual, and pink worms were everywhere, wriggling with abandon, their bodies translucent, our science teacher holding one up to the light and showing us the dark sac of the stomach and the small smear of the brain. My birthday came on March 21, the first day of spring, my sign the ram with her white horns in a thicket.

  I don’t know if my parents sensed my sensing. My father, for sure, saw my excitement when the police horses had passed through as I, throwing open the second-floor window, my hands thrust out into the blinding white, yelled out the only thing I could think to say in such a situation: “Hey! Hey!” The horses didn’t stop. The snow did. Bulbs, long buried beneath the close-cropped lawns, put forth their serpent skulls. For my birthday that year I got a bike. On its wicker basket were plastic tulips, and the handlebars sported purple and silver streamers, sparkles scattered in the seat. A Schwinn. “A Schwinn!” I shouted out. The bell had a sharp sound, a brrrrring, like someone shivering, from excitement or from fear, it wasn’t clear.

  I was only nine, but my father worked downtown, his hours long, and my mother was consumed with some rage-filled sadness that became, over days and weeks, like her own little ghetto, its color, in my mind, always changing like the lipsticks she wore, a melancholy mauve, a bitter red, a punch pink; who knew why, or when? I couldn’t understand her and because I couldn’t understand her I couldn’t claim her; she wasn’t mine. The bike was mine. The snow was gone. The neighborhood was safe, so what was there to watch, really? I was just another nine-year-old on a stingray seat, my wicker basket full of dandelions, snapped stems oozing milk. My brother and sisters went one way, I went another, and that was that. At first I rode around the block and then I rode around two blocks and before the week was through I rode beyond the Golden Ghetto, pedaling furiously, wind in my hair, my eyes tearing from the sharp spring air, my chest at once flung open with excitement even as it was compressed with want. Where were those policemen? Was it possible that their horses lived near here? The next town over was almost just like ours, the same red-brick schoolhouse, the same patriotic post office, the same butcher with his fresh cuts hanging on hooks in the window. I rode farther still. I found a barber on a side street, his pole twisted twirls of color, his scissors flashing as he cut the white locks off an old man’s hair. I stopped to see. The barber worked so gently, draping a hank across his palm and then softly snipping, the floor floss-soft with fallings. The barber kept his combs in bowls of sudsy water and the old man, bibbed to his chin, slept with his head lolling in the sunlight pouring through the wall-sized window through which I watched. The barber beckoned me in. I lowered my kickstand and pushed open the door. The spring air still carried the winter’s chill, but in here it was toasty and the old man softly snored. “What’s a girl like you doing without a scarf?” the barber asked, his glasses down on his nose, his eyes a rich blue. “Who’s cold?” I said, although in fact, now that I was in here, I realized that I was. A sudden sleepiness came over me and it occurred to me I could be dreaming this scene, asleep in my bed, the snap snap of the scissors suddenly charged with misty meaning, the pouring sunlight infusing the room with the golden color of heaven. I wanted to leave and I wanted to stay at the same time, aware that, real or not, this was a world beyond my own, and anything could happen here. “Your name?” the barber asked, and I said “Lauren,” its sound for some reason all wrong, not mine; Lauren Lauren Lauren and a jolt went through me, hard to explain, the sudden awareness that I existed, separate from my surroundings.

  “Lauren,” said the barber and chuckled. “Why don’t you take a scarf from the rack over there and return it next time you ride by?” He pointed with his scissors to a series of hooks affixed to the wall: mittens, hats, scarves, hanging from them. “Customers leave half themselves behind almost every time,” the barber said. “Most never return for their things,” and he shook his head at the wrongness, the waste, which I went towards, one scarf in particular catching my eye, made not of wool but of feathers—sunset pink, and soft, too, when I touched them. I took the scarf from the hook and wrapped it round my neck and saw myself in the glass, a bird girl. The barber smiled. “It’s you,” he said, and I said, “Thanks,” and then I left, the day darkening now, the windows of restaurants starting to glow as I headed home, feathers flying.

  It was March when I got my Schwinn. By June, after school let out, I was riding farther each day. I rode under bridges where pigeons clustered in the rafters above me, chirring softly or sleeping with heads beneath wings. I rode over highways and dipped down into towns where stores lined the streets, displaying their wares on the sidewalk, banners of silk and chimes. Every day I pushed on just a little farther, the houses at last becoming scarce, lawns giving way to meadow where wild turkeys pecked at seeds. I was after something here, but if you had asked me what it was I could not have told you. In my mind I saw those police horses, in the blizzard, atomizing into particles of white. I sought, perhaps, to assemble something. I sought, perhaps, the experience of distance itself, learning each day that I could create it, imagining as I rode that a long red ribbon spooled from my pocket, marking my forward progress while, in reverse, it pointed me towards home, when the darkness came. The ghetto’s cropped and careful lawns gave way to messy meadows, and the messy meadows became fields, and as they did I drew closer to what it was. A place without look-alike houses. A place where my mother’s sadness did not suffuse—even the smallest things—so whatever you saw or touched or tasted had her in it, to such a point that it sometimes seemed like the whole world was a woman with her name on it. I sought something separate.

  The country. I was miles from home when I finally found it. The country came to me first as a distant but distinct odor: Sweet decaying dung piled high by paddocks. And then there were novel sounds, like the kunk kunk of a woman hoeing her earth or the squeal of a big barn door opening slowly for a spotted cow to pass through. Red barns blazed at the far fringes of fields and, roadside, the occasional house listed left or right.

  Now that I’d found the country, I ceased riding without reason and, every day that summer I mounted my bike and pointed myself in a precise direction. What I knew was that people disappeared, if you went far enough, and then there was just you and the enormous yolk of sun and the cows with their heads hanging over their low fencing. At first I fed the cows grass I pulled from the roadside, their limber lips pulling in green, munching and munching while foam collected at the corners of their mouths. Then I touched their mouths—a buttery, leathery softness—and then, without thinking, I scooted beneath the fence and found myself inside a whole new kind of box, the biggest box I’d ever seen, the fenced field sloping down to a clot of trees and bramble bushes sporting exorbitant pink platters of flowers. I stood still, listening, but it seemed I was the only human sound around. I whistled and heard my echo bounce around, and as it dissipated, the cows, one by one, began to go down, sleepy, all of a sudden, their front legs buckling first, then their hind sides, their long-lashed eyes closing in the summer sun, big mounds of breathing I touched with the flat of my palm, feeling their sleep rise up into me, and then the ache of exhaustion came over me, too, and, and so I, too, slid down on my seat and put my head against the haunches of a mottled female, hearing her insides tick and gurgle, feeling her shift and stretch with the rhythm of her dreams,
and then my dreams, how long they lasted I’m not sure, but when I woke I was still against her side and the sun was still in the sky. I stood. Beneath me she slept on, her udder rising and falling with her breath. I knelt down then, right next to those four fatty teats, as long as my fingers, but boneless. As gently as I could I placed my hand on her milk bag, surprised by how hot it was, by how hard, despite her gentle easy sleep. I enclosed one teat in my fist and gave the softest, most tentative tug, a spritz of milk spraying me in the face; I stumbled backwards. The cow lowed. She opened one enormous eye and looked at me, and then lowed again, long and sonorous. From the distance I heard someone call and then I saw him, a man coming up the hill, his broad-brimmed hat bobbing as he walked. I scuttled back under the fence, hopped on my bike and pedaled as fast as I could in the direction of home, which was far from here, the light going now, my heart clattering in its cage as if I’d stolen something—milk—and then, mile by mile, my whole body slowing, a sad sort of sinking as the rural retreated and I smelled the suburbs coming closer, barbecues and gasoline. Maybe an hour passed before I dared look behind me, at what I’d left. By then, of course, there was nothing to see, the farmland too deep in the distance, my hands sticky with milk, and sweet to the taste when I lifted them to my lips.

  She sensed something but could not say what it was. I was slipping from her, and rather than grieve, she became angry. “Where do you go every day?” my mother asked me, and I shrugged and said, “Just around.” Once I saw her in the laundry room. She held my shirt by the shoulders and slowly brought it to her nose and then, with a quick flick of her wrist, she dropped it in the washer. At nine my body was a board, my chest flat, the nipples so pale they were barely there. But she sensed, I think, some subtle shift, not yet here but near. I had dirt beneath my fingernails and briars in my hair. After we were all supposed to be asleep my parents argued, and sometimes they said my name—Lauren, Lauren—so I knew I was part of the problem, but which part, and which problem? When he left her each time she was crying, always crying in her Kleenex, the trashcan piled high with crumpled tissue. By night her tears softened her and she leaked like any other mammal, but by day her face was a mask tied tightly to her skull. The evening I came home after touching the teat, she looked at me darkly, as if she knew. “Wash up for dinner,” she snapped, and I did, soaping my arms up to their elbows, rubbing my face with suds, but some essential smell was on me now. We ate at the dining room table and when I went to reach for the peas I knocked my milk glass over, and the liquid dripped off the table edge, darkening the carpet below. “Goddamnit!” my mother said, her voice all wrong, too tight, and when I looked into her face I saw it had cracked, the way land cracks in the high heat; she had a zig-zag rent running from her forehead to her chin and from the rent came a red light. “Calm down, Barbara,” my father said while my brother and sisters sat silent. “Calm down?” my mother spat back at him, a question he couldn’t answer. He shook his head slowly and, with his napkin, began to mop up the mess. “You,” my mother said, pointing at us with her fork. “You think he’s so sweet? Dear old dad,” she said, and then laughed. “You’ll never know,” she said, “what it means to live like this.” That night, in bed, her words were in my head. To live like what? I wondered.