The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals

by Lauren Slater

  The next morning, at breakfast, still wondering and paying no attention, I spilled my milk again and she hit the side of my face so hard a bruise formed atop my cheekbone, where my hair hung down so no one could see. That day I rode fast to the country, fast to the cows, but when I got there they were gone, the pasture empty. For four days I came back, in search of milk I could spill, and for four days I found just sun-baked land, the goldenrod thick on the banks by the low fence. I began to think it was a dream, no dung, nothing, to prove otherwise.

  And so I went on. I pushed past that pasture and found others, but the cows were always on the far side and they ignored me, rebuffed me, even when I held out bunches of greens. In some ways it didn’t matter because I was surrounded, out there, surrounded by hip-high grasses and lime-colored crickets poised on oval leaves. The air was packed with a complex jumble of scents I learned, over time, to separate into segments; the dung, the sweat, the hay, the loam, the flower-packed fields, the pigs in their pen, the dense smell of slop in a rubber bucket. I found a wild grapevine, the bulbous fruits taut, dark juice spurting when I bit into their bodies, the seeds, which I spit into my palm, afloat in a light green gel.

  The vine, which grew along an unkempt fence, was so ridden and rife with fruit that it took me days of eating to follow its trail around a corner, up a small hill, and into a cove where all of a sudden the daylight vanished, the trees here packed together, trunk to trunk, their enormous branches creaking when the breezes blew. Tacked to one of the trunks was a rusted tilted sign: “Private Way,” and, indeed, when I looked down at my feet I saw they were on some sort of rutted path, overgrown with brambles and barely visible, but a path nonetheless.

  Private Way. My parents had many private ways, their clues just crumpled tissues or dagger glances tossed across our heads, as though we would not notice. My mother had her private ways, that rent I’d seen in her face, the red light coming from the rip there, suggesting that her insides were bright and quite possibly too much to bear. The bruise on my cheek was a private way, hidden by my hair, a stamp, a suggestion, a clue for someone to find, but no one found it. I was sick of secrets. Thus I decided to discard the sign, not literally, but to discard it nonetheless. I was going to go here, where I was not wanted. I parked my bike by the base of a tree and, following the private path, made my way into those woods.

  Darkness. Deep suede shade. Vines twirled around tree trunks, disappearing into the uppermost level of leaves, which clapped when the wind blew, as if I had an audience—eyes—watching. I looked left, then right, trying to see who saw, catching a gleam, hearing a hoot, and then gone. I found, in the dense undergrowth, a rusted tractor, its body orange, its tires flattened, the seat ripped open so its coils sprung free. The tractor glowed in the dank forest, a machine long lost but as if alive. It was hunkered down so silently, its silence suggesting something strange about it, as if at any moment its engine might leap into life. As I crept closer I stumbled across a large bug-eaten boot and then a sound—sudden—surrounding me, this high humming, someone else here, but where? Again I looked, left, then right, up, then down, the sound intensifying as I neared the broken, radiant machine, the humming hard to describe; it made my ears ache and yet it called me closer, the sound of a thousand voices or of just one, a girl perhaps, a single girl singing in a tree above the tractor.

  I called out then: Helloooooo, and I swear the humming ceased for a second and then started again. The tractor had two enormous headlights, and the sun slanting through the trees made the bulbs beneath the lenses look lit. I reached out to touch the lens, and for some reason I saw myself then, standing in the kitchen, my mother crying, I, reaching out to touch the lens of her eye, which in my mind was stilled, gone to glass, beyond blinking. I saw myself in the snap of a second touching her where one never would and finding a terrible fixed stillness as she stared at me like a doll, and then my own eyes went wet from a sadness much too unwieldy to put in some package, the humming now higher, now harder, and coming from … here. In an instant I saw the spot, in the busted fluff of the machine’s ripped seat. I craned my neck out, looked over the lip of leather, and discovered, in the seat, the squirm and throb of thousands. A nest it was, a whole humming home in there. I picked up a stick, then, and, surprised by the coldness of my curiosity, I used it to poke and prod. The humming went wild in response. I saw the glint of wings, too big for bees, the wings flexed and fluttered and then, one by one, from deep in the center of the tractor’s torn seat, dragonflies, hundreds of dragonflies, rose like royalty into the air, hovered briefly above me, and then swerved up steeply, disappearing into the tops of trees. I dropped the stick. I’d seen dragonflies before, of course, but these were different, because their electric blue bodies throbbed in the draped forest; because they were en masse and audible, and because their presence in a place I was not supposed to be saturated them with significance, turned them to Tinker Bells, or eerie fairies. On and on they went, ascending from the seat, carving paths in the dark air, going up, diving down, swinging around, around, and around. Yes. I was with wings.

  That summer, and thanks to my Schwinn, the Private Way became for me a place where I could question. Looking back on it now I wonder why it didn’t occur to me to be scared—a girl alone in the woods and crimes happening everywhere, all the time, but I wasn’t scared, not then, anyway. That was the summer a girl named Emma Gin disappeared, her parents appearing on TV, making pleas, and not long after pieces of her found in the Wayland woods, and yet I wasn’t scared. I wasn’t in the Wayland woods, but even if I had been I don’t think it would have mattered. What scared me were houses, things too carefully cut, or the shining aisles of the supermarket where meats were packed in plastic. What scared me were dinner times and the tongue my mother served one night, the tastebuds visible. Taste it, she said; it’s kosher. I put the tongue on my tongue and felt trapped, then, in the absurdity of an experience where there were no words to define or even describe. We ate the tongue with our tongues, under orders. My father, trying to back my mother or maybe just a dedicated meat eater, said it was delicious. The meat was a livid pink, a plank on my plate, all gone. First in the fields, and then in the forest, following the overgrown path of someone’s private way, things seemed possible again, enchanting, chantable, each unusual item explicable and attached to some scheme I sensed made sense, even if I hadn’t yet grasped it. When my mother cried, there was no answer to her tears, but the high humming had revealed itself to me as an insect with a name and a place. At home, in the “D” volume of our encyclopedia, I looked up dragonflies and learned that they had large compound eyes that saw in every direction all at once. Small now, they had once, in the Jurassic era, been as big as birds, darting and diving over ponds where dinosaurs drank. I put the “D” volume back on the shelf and pulled out the “Z,” fanning the pages, each one gilt edged, the pictures blurring by; I saw zebras and zygotes and zeniths, and I felt as if someone were stirring a stick in the center of me, awakening within me my own high humming, my own need for naming, describing, defining, while also becoming aware, right then and there, that knowing was not the same as answering. If you had asked me who my mother was I could have answered you. Yet I knew nothing of her. I did, however, know something about those dragonflies, their enormous eyes, their pupae, that they were born in water and grew wings only at the very end of their lives, learning to fly just as they were about to die.

  Thirty, forty feet into the private way was a small pond, the clear water the color of deeply steeped tea, surrounded by cattails and gracile grasses. I lay on my belly on the moist bank and watched the watery world beneath me. Frogs, I noticed, uncurled their long tongues to which flies got stuck, and then swallowed. These amphibian animals lay their eggs in clusters of opaque sacs that floated just below the surface of the water and then bloomed into tiny translucent tadpoles whose pulsing hearts were visible, fast, violet flutters. I observed a spider making her waxy web, and then saw that web go to work as all manner of
minute insects got trapped within its sticky strands. I learned, from a library book, that spiders have mouths, tiny hinged maws that they use to devour their prey, mercilessly, sometimes over a series of days, the prey losing its life in the worst way, bit by tiny bit, an elongated torture that could have, perhaps should have, suggested to me that animals, at least sometimes, are cruel.

  And yet the spider didn’t seem cruel to me, and if you’d asked me why, at nine, I would have told you it was because the spider was acting the way it was supposed to. When she slammed me upside the cheek, or, worse, when, during wars, humans hung others from branches, asphyxiating them slowly so as to prolong their pain, people were acting outside the alphabet. This was the phrase that came to me, at nine, and now, at forty eight, I’m still not sure what it means. The animal world worked its spell on me in part because it could be spelled, full of mysteries, yes, but absurdities, no. Amongst animals one was grounded, tethered to the raveled rope that held us together as humans, but when you separated yourself from animals you separated yourself also from your own skin, and forgot what it was you, as a person, were supposed to do, or be. You made a fake face or gassed your young and instead of spelling stories you spread silence, which was outside the alphabet. I cannot say much more than this. All around me in those woods were alphabets, from the croaking of the frogs to the high hummings of the dragonflies to the callings of coyotes, as night neared, and the pond water darkened, and reflected back to me the stone in the sky.

  July crept on, the whole earth, it seemed, baking in the heavy heat, and the animals of the forest grew drowsy, snakes sunning themselves on rotted logs. I found snake skins on the ground, amazed by their intricate patterns, which I started to sketch in a book I bought with my allowance money. I’d put the sketchbook in my bike basket and bring it down the private way with me and sketch the spiders I saw, the plants I saw, observing how they changed shape when water was near. At home I checked more and more books out of the library, my knowledge deepening even as my answers floated away. At nine, I didn’t mind the floating feeling, and if there is anything I wish I could hang on to from that time it is this: the ability to stay suspended in space, living the liminal, in a place where there was no such thing as stink. I often thought of her holding my shirt, bringing it up to her nose, and then tossing it into the wash the way she did. Animals can attack you but they will never, ever revile you. Only humans can do that.

  As the forest grew around me and inside me, my own home began to fall away. It was as if the walls were coming down, one by one. The crying fights at night turned into screaming, my mother screaming in the hall, her hands clenched. What is ON you? she sometimes asked me, prodding at me with her sharply shaped fingernail. She aimed her eye on me much more than on my siblings, who either faded from her view or grew as proportionally precious to her as I was wrong. All wrong. Sometimes she sunk her nails into my skin and I dreamt they went right through me, her hands entering my entrails, pulling them out, string by string. At home, I began to be scared all the time. My older sister whispered to me that my mother was ill and would soon be going to a hospital. What at the age of nine did I know about mental illness and the genetic liability she passed on? I believed I’d found an escape. I had no inkling that over time my mother’s grief would become mine, and that eventually, years hence, I’d lose the capacity for comfort only to find it again, when I was a mother myself.

  I learned partly by book, partly by eyes alone. Snakes with printed skins, their bodies cool to the touch. Deer prints looked like this, coyote prints like that. Down here was the scat of a brown bear. Chipmunks lived in that old stone wall, six of them, shy no matter how softly you sang. Squirrels, however, had harder hearts and would come for an acorn if you sat still enough, day after day after day. Moles ran by, blinded. Wrens sang just so. Starlings were harder to hear but prettier to the ears. I filled the basket of my bike with my sketching notebook and wrinkled raisins and curled cashews taken from the mirrored bar where their liquor bottles were. My mother drank the liquor, pouring a clear scorching liquid over crackling ice, lifting the glass to her lips and tossing it back. Sometimes, then, she sang, the sound not pretty. We listened to her lying in our beds, and then the song would stop and she’d start to talk; you, she’d say, shed in the sheets; you, she’d say, put the keys in the hanging closet. Sometimes my father was there but other times he wasn’t, and she went on anyway, talking to the walls, the window, the world itself, her first finger flexed and pointed, accusingly, at the moon.

  I largely forgot about her in the forest, or at least it seemed I did. I didn’t know then that the mind, like the earth, has several layers: a crust, a mantle, a boiling core. I stayed up on top. I saw holes in the ground, ragged circles that went down, dark. I knelt and smelled something rank and alive in there. I planted the nuts from my parent’s liquor bar all the way around the entrance to those holes and then sat back, waiting in the shade. At last foxes appeared, their pointy faces popping up, their scrappy paws swiping the nuts down into their dens. I did this for days, and then stopped. Instead, now, I put the nuts on the forest floor, in a small pile, and then sat back against a tree, the food just a few feet from me. How close, I wanted to know, could we come? The foxes saw me and smelled the treats and knew what I was up to. In the earth below me I listened to their language, a panoply of chirps and gurgles and quick, high barks. They debated and decided, their heads poking up, dropping down, overtaken by ambivalence, until at last what looked like a large male made his way towards the pile, nose to the ground, his eyes all amber. Click click, with my tongue. The fox stopped, cocked his head, then started again. I got quiet in a way I’d never been before. I entered into stillness. The fox kept coming, his movements both slinky and slow, five curled cashews, crystalled with the grit of sparkling salt, midway between us. As he approached I could see his whiskers, the slope of his snout, the dark dots of his nostrils. It took some time, a long, long time, but at last he crept so close I could hear his breath and see him take the nuts with his teeth, his jaw working as he chewed, fast, then bent his head for more. He eyed me the whole time and then, when he was done, he turned away and trotted back into the forest.

  It wasn’t until August that I found the egg. It lay in the forest on a little patch of grass, entirely alone, no bird near here. I scanned the sky between the branches but saw just chinks of blue and the faintest fingernail of an afternoon moon. I looked straight up the trunk of the nearest tree and then the tree after that and the tree after that, but there was no nest in sight. It appeared that this egg had been dropped straight from some solar system, perhaps carried down to the ground by a winged thing that had borne it but could not bear it, and so wanted to pass it on.

  I picked up the egg. It was more delicate and perfect than anything I’d ever held and I knew, immediately, that I would keep it, that I would bring it back with me, into the Golden Ghetto. I pressed the orb to my ear and thought I heard, from within, a small slosh, and I pictured a thimble-sized being turning round and round, flexing its fleecy wings, opening and shutting its ruby beak as it readied itself for its enormous task, based entirely on faith, cracking the caul of your gorgeous surround in search of something still finer.

  That day I filled my bike basket with leaves and grasses to cushion the egg on the long way home, and, for the first time, I brought a piece of the forest back with me, into the Golden Ghetto. Right from the start the egg made it seem like anything here could happen, and I believed this all the more when I showed it to my mother, carrying it into the kitchen, which was growing dark as the evening arrived, her silhouette, I remember, and my words: Look, look, my voice strangely soft, my hands cupped closed, my very being emanating a mystery she could not resist. “At what?” my mother asked, turning from the window towards me now, her own voice suddenly soft, too, mirroring mine, as if we were, indeed, under some spell, entirely transformed, I no longer with stink, she coming quietly across the kitchen floor to look, look, and when she was close I open
ed the hub of my hands and she saw resting down deep in my joined palms the tiny perfect orb of the egg and she said, Oh. Oh.

  And we two stood there for a second and I swear I saw her oh’s leave her mouth and drift off into the air, floating up like bubbles and breaking painlessly above us, the first oh rising, then the second oh following the first, and I said, “An egg, Mom, from the forest,” and she said, “What kind?” her voice rising up at the end of her question as voices often do, and so we were risen, even as we were, for the first time in a long time, tethered to the ground by quotidian conversation. An egg, Mom. What kind?