The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals

by Lauren Slater

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m going to look it up. Find out. A cardinal maybe.” I paused then. “Can I keep it?”

  She leaned over again, to peer down into her daughter’s dark hands, where the egg lay, and I saw things stream across her face then, feelings, but I don’t know what those feelings were. With one finger she reached out and softly stroked the side of the egg and I watched, entranced, her finger going back, now forth, that finger from the same hand that had slammed me, and yet here she was, her second self, a gentler self rising to the surface of her skin, cracked open in kindness, or maybe by memory; I said, “Mom.”

  Mom. I wasn’t calling her, or questioning her. Mom. I’d meant it as a chime but she took it as a “can I” question and stumbled backwards a bit and then said, as if confused, “Yes. Yes. We’ll make it a nest.” And then she paused. She was over by the sink now, leaning against it. I watched her. Years of tensions had crisscrossed her face and made her mouth crimped at its corners, but at just that moment I could see a second face behind the first, a face from long ago, a face from perhaps before she was even born, and this face was plain and open, the skin smooth and moist. It was like looking at her through a translucent shell she was trapped in, and how had that happened to her? To all the Golden Ghetto? “Yes, yes,” she said again, and again, that look of confusion, coming over her. She turned, looked back out the window over the sink. It was dark now, completely dark, and cicadas shrieked in the lawns. “How,” she asked, “will we keep it warm?”

  My father found a shoebox, my sister a small desk light that we shone on it, for warmth. I placed the box on my bureau, across from my bed. That night they fought, as usual, and she cried, as usual, but instead of hearing her tears I kept hearing her question in my mind, and how her voice went up at the end, like a little wisp rising. I kept seeing her finger, unfurling, stroking the tiny egg, and I wondered if, when I was a baby, she had ever touched me like that. Was I once, I wondered, perfect to her, and as soon as the question formed it was followed by a kind of crushing grief, the sort for which there are no tears, and so you stare, dry eyed, out at your surroundings. Which was the Golden Ghetto and the treeless streets and the strict squares of neighboring windows. I didn’t know it then but I had just come up against a question that let loose within me the most primeval ache, and it could not be permanently packed away ever again, no matter how hard I tried, and I did try, again and again, for years. Was I once perfect to her? I saw myself as if from above, my cranky curls, scum on my skin, my chest now mounded ever so slightly, a pain when I pressed there, a deep pink singeing.

  In our photo album was a picture of me at one year or younger, in a sailor’s dress and tied white toddler shoes, perched on her knees, her one arm around me, in her other hand a cigarette coiling silvery smoke. Fresh from my own little egg, she had held me with care, or even love, but then time took me, touched me, made me, somehow, all together other, a creature without classification. I saw her as she saw me, with scum on my skin, and a little window inside me shut and the shades were drawn and a darkness came, and I couldn’t come out of it. I walked to the sill, the grief settling like silt, and for years I would feel that wordless grief, casting its pall over everything—the tree, the chair, the chimney—and then, when it went, as it often did, coming and going, going and coming, my returned world was all the more beautiful to me. The dividends of darkness, I would later write in an essay about depression for which I found a treatment when I was in my twenties, another orb filled with a chemical concoction; it helped some days and then some days it didn’t. It all started, I think, that night, when I was nine. On my bureau I saw the box all aglow; the egg was warm inside. And why could that not comfort me? I should have slept soundly but, as it turns out, the light kept me up most of those nights, which grew cooler and cooler, autumn now right around the corner, school starting soon, the egg here, the forest there, and that was that.

  In a perfect world full of perfect people who are exactly as they are meant to be and not who they become—shape shifted by cruelty, or terror, or simply rote repetition—in a perfect world, the egg would have cracked soon after I’d taken it home and from its shattered shell would have stepped a bird just as I’d dreamt her, singing like a strummed harp. But of course no world is perfect, neither those we build with our own hands, nor those we find for ourselves, full of foxes and moles and soft-stepping deer.

  School started, fifth grade, which meant I could not go back to the forest, and my father put my bike away, hung it from a hook in the garage, its wheels suspended off the ground, caked mud falling from its treads and clumping on the concrete. During the day, now, I was in math class or English class, and I wondered why none of it had any interest for me, why the words, the worlds, in my fifth-grade books fell flat, while all through the summer I’d read avidly, as though transported by some spell. I remember that, in history, we read a book called Medieval Days and Ways. In Latin we declined nouns and verbs. Yom Kippur came and the rabbi read off the long list of the dead while the grandparents of the Golden Ghetto davened back and forth, and we sang “Kol Nidre,” a sacred song I have always loved for the way it transforms deep grief into a thing of beauty, the voices swelling in the sanctuary, and then the cantor lifting the horn to his lips and bellowing into, or rather against, the blackness beyond the windows.

  Have a happy New Year, everyone said when it was over, kissing each cheek, in the lobby the old people holding my hands in theirs, gripping me hard as if to say, Stay. Stay. There were plates set out on long tables, and platters of diced apples and bowls of golden honey. My mother said to Sadie Rosenblum and the Ellers, “Do you know my daughter has an egg she found in the forest?” People perked up and came to ask me questions. Right on a patch of grass, I said. Small and silvery. No, not even a crack. In a box, with a lamp, to keep it warm. For some reason the egg invoked a kind of curiosity in the old ones, the survivors, who, soon after the New Year, came around to see. The Ellers, the Rosenblums, the Schwartzes, the Loves, they rang our bell and, pair by pair, on different days, climbed our carpeted stairs to peer inside the shoebox. I watched them watch, tiny tremors in their hands, veins like smashed grapes blotching their burdened legs, the blue tattoos covered with gloves or exposed to the cold, the skin there chafed and hairless. The old survivor Hassids, their lives governed by religious rules that left little room for the sudden, the surprise, well, they leaned over, into, the shoebox and stared, murmuring remarkable, splendid, l’chaim, but it wasn’t what they said that mattered. It was what went across their faces, or appeared in their eyes, a whole history they’d cordoned off, cracking through the cauls they’d wrapped around themselves. A tiny piece of the forest they’d once hid in had found its way to the Golden Ghetto, only this time they weren’t scared. This time they were with want, missing. I could see it by how long they stared, how softly they murmured, how gently they touched the tiny sphere. The earth has a hold on us, no matter what our memories.

  Sometimes a question comes over you so completely you become it. It is like being draped, and there is darkness over everything except the question. The question ceases to be a grammatical occurrence and becomes, instead, a throbbing thing, a must. When, oh when, would my egg hatch? Day after day I inspected it for signs, and day after day it stayed immutably stubbornly smooth, and the days passed into weeks and the weeks became a month, and the leaves fell from our few pruned trees, saffron hands passing by my window on their way down to the ground. The clock ticking on my mantle sounded like high heels, click tick click, coming closer, now receding, my heart flapping fast from a fear with no name, the egg, its surface so smooth and blank. With no forest to escape to, and trapped in the grid of the ghetto and the rote repetition of school, I lost touch with my meaning. I forgot there were cows with hot, hard bags and lacy sprays of milk. I forgot there was a pond held in a scoop of land, the water tea-colored, transparent, the tiny tadpoles swerving between fronds. I forgot the foxes even, and how they’d come for nuts and
candy. My dreams were full of fog. I woke up to the sound of the talking ticking clock and I was claimed by the question, jumping from bed, peering over the lip of the box—no change, no change, no change—and this is how it happened, how the egg went from a silvery sphere of luck to this terrible ovoid if.

  Daylight savings came, which meant the streets became blue earlier each day, shadows flocking the house, from floor to ceiling. Even when the sun was out it was different from the summer sun, which had been radiant and wet, spreading across its pink background in spectacular shows of setting. The November sun was the size of a diamond in the dim sky, its glint meager, its light entering your eye and passing through, so pale you couldn’t feel it.

  My mother felt it. She had not been well for a long, long time, but this autumn sent her falling farther and faster than usual: the lack of light, the silent streets, her alabaster children and then the one with scum on her skin. Her husband, who wounded her in ways we might very well never know; I tried to tell, to see him as she might see him, watching him now as he walked the hall, a perennially pale person, every Shabbat his yarmulke tilted and attached with a clip to his thinning hair, his scalp exposing itself, almost indecently, the skin there pink as pork, its surface scaly, flakes falling off him as he shuffled from here to there. To us he was nothing but kind, if a little absent minded, but to her he was almost evil, and sometimes it seemed I could see it, this flaming lady married to a man who was more ghost than flesh, not enough for her, no authority, and she, even as she reared up and roared, wanting in some part of her mind to be tacked and tethered, strapped to a safety he would never provide.

  That autumn—severed from the forest and waiting on my egg, time for the first time making its appearance in my life, its terrible persistent tick taking you nowhere so slowly you wanted to scream—that autumn my parents ceased fighting and a silence filled our house, and the silence could not be broken even when it was. You could speak, but the silence swallowed your words before they’d made a mark, and so it seemed none of us could hear each other, and we were all confused, stumbling around, our mother standing by the kitchen window and petting her neck, up and down and around and around, petting her neck as if it was something separate from her.

  When the bird came, I would bring it to her, just as I’d brought the egg. Over and over I played the scene in my increasingly agitated mind. The egg would crack perfectly in half and from its broken shell would step a feisty ready-to-fly baby bird. Cupping it in my hands, which were now a second sort of shell, I’d come into the kitchen and say, “Mom,” and something in my voice would put its soft hook in her and pull her towards me, and together we’d bend our heads and view the baby bird. And with one finger now unfurling she would stroke its feathered skull, her gentleness evident, her touch so true I’d feel my own head held, as if by her, she looking at me with pride, because see what I—her second daughter—had brought back from the forest?

  This is the scene I played over and over in my mind, and as I pictured it I’d stare at the damn dumb egg, which was at once crucial to my fantasy even as it made its fulfillment impossible. “It takes time for eggs to gestate,” my father said, but weeks had gone by, a season had changed, and this egg was still in a slumber so steep it seemed it might never awaken. When when when when morphed into if if if, the question mark finally clasping me too tightly to its curve, I drawing in draughts of air, my heart going so fast I felt it might breach my chest and throb along outside me. In school I stared out the window where every day I saw a tiny plane flying by at precisely 11:03 a.m. If only I had a for-sure—a time when the egg would hatch, some sort of schedule, an obvious endpoint—that would make it easier. It could be a year from now, or today, just something definite, the cruel curve of the question mark becoming the calming point of a period.

  I wasn’t crazy. I was anxious, but definitely not crazy, but how was I to know that, at nine years of age, my body doing its own little dance utterly apart from my notions or desire, the sensitized mounds mounding more and the nipples now swelling and going dark as nutmeg. I ceased sleeping well, the lamplight over the egg blazing too brightly in the dark, and the sound of her pacing in the halls, dragging her manicured nails across the plaster so it snowed on the margins of our carpets, white plaster dust rising up and coating the silver-rimmed mirror in the hall.

  Then one day, a Saturday, November now, my mother left the house just after sundown, Shabbat over, she tying a kerchief around her head and pulling on a big black coat and when we asked her where she was going, she said, simply, “Out.”

  “Barbara,” my father said, and she said, “Every man needs a little mystery,” and then she left, closing the door behind her. I went to my room, looked in on my egg. Exhausted—the lamp light and my nattering mind making sleep difficult every night now—I lay on my bed—one hour, two hours—and was just slipping over the rim when I heard her car crunch into the driveway, and then the engine turning off. I sat up, waiting to hear the slamming of the car door, her steps on our walkway, the front door handle turning, but there were no sounds, nothing. I went to my window and saw the car below, its interior lit, she just sitting behind the wheel, in a sealed space.

  She came in at last. I heard the car door open, close, and then our front door open, close, and then my father, his voice unusually loud, almost a shout; “Barbara,” he said, and she laughed a strange little laugh that went up and down the scales, girlish, tinkling. “Barbara,” my father said again, and then a series of sharp rapid barks. I opened the door to my room then and went down the hall, down the stairs, and there she stood, her coat still on, pink-streaked cheeks, her usually sprayed hair windblown, in her arms a teacup dog, a miniature greyhound, its skin slack over its bony body, its eyes bulbous and alarmed. Tiny, my mother pronounced, holding him to her, pressing the bony beast to her chest and smooching his hide with her lips. “His name is Tiny,” she said, staring at my father, who stared at the dog, his eyes wide, his scalp glistening, as if oiled. And then, before he could say anything else, she thrust the dog at my father, forcing Tiny into his arms, the beast beginning to howl as my father fumbled, stumbled, clasped the now-panicked, scrabbling canine scratching feebly at his face.

  “Barbara,” he gasped as the dog twisted and flung about, and she laughed a wicked wretched laugh and stood back, saying, “Look at you there. Just look at you.” My brother and two sisters were in the living room, I standing on the last, the lowest step in the hall. We all, on cue, looked at my hapless father, Tiny overpowering him by thrashing wildly and swiping his face so finally he dropped the dog and said, “Jesus.”

  “He’s nowhere around here,” my mother said, turning to me, and then swiveling towards my siblings and saying, “See. Do you see it now? Do you?”

  The four of us stood, frozen. Our father. We saw. We saw his naked pork-pink scalp, his alarmed eyes, his kindness, and his clumsiness. But, in the end, we saw him as his children, not his spouse, so what were failings in her eyes were mere idiosyncrasies in ours. “You,” my mother said, turning and then pointing to me. “Do you see?”

  Then I knew, in an instant, why she wouldn’t love me, couldn’t love me, even as I blazed before her, brighter than her others. I knew what she wanted me to say, but her words were not my words, never. Stubborn, she had always claimed, but now I’m not so sure. It isn’t as if I insisted on being me; it felt more as if I simply had no choice. At some basic level, you do not pick your views; it’s just the opposite. They claim you, and the only question is what you will decide to do with them. “Do you?” she said again. “Do you see?”

  I looked at my father, my mother, my father, the dog sprawled on the floor between them. “No,” I said. “I do not see.” Her eyes narrowed and sparked. We stared at one another and when the stare got too hard, too sharp I turned away. Quickly, then, she looked to my siblings, the three of them standing in a row by the piano. She made some sound, a kind of gargling, warped little sound, or was it a word? “Do you see?” she said to th
em. Frightened, they gave barely perceptible nods of assent while my father stepped back, shaking his head, his whole scalp burning as he brushed greyhound hair from his clothes.

  Tiny, as it turned out, was an animal as anxious as we were, and to make matters worse he was nocturnal in nature, howling whole nights away, keeping each one of us not only awake but keyed up, my senses heightened so it seemed I could smell and hear and see prismatically, every facet of existence honed to a keen gleam. In the darkness, after midnight, Tiny’s howls rattled the whole house while we tossed and turned. Strangely, only my mother seemed peaceful. Tiny’s distress had a paradoxical effect on her; it seemed to calm her, at least for the first few days when she sat up all night long, soothing him on the living room couch, the television on even when there were no shows, at 3 a.m., 4 a.m., the screen filled with static as she stroked the little animal and I watched from the hall, where she could not see me, her murmurs audible, the static sizzling, his howls finally giving way to whimpers just as the domed surface of the sky cracked with the first line of light. The house was finally silent, Tiny and my mother dreaming on the living room couch, surrounded by piles of blankets and opened boxes of biscuits and bones, white bones as big as my fist, stuffed with crimson meat. I’d turn off the television then and climb between my sheets, and fall into an hour or two of fitful slumber until the alarm burned through my dreams of trees and toads. It was time for school.

  And so we went along, Tiny howling out some sort of hurt or rage, some essential insult, my mother now suddenly, noxiously, soothing, the egg sleeping through the whole hurrah, until Friday came around again; “Shabbat,” my mother announced. “A time of rest.” Before sundown that Friday afternoon, my mother drove to the drugstore and came back with a bottle of Nyquil which, after our Shabbat meal, she fed to the dog by a dropper. Tiny liked the taste and so my mother gave him more, filling the glass dropper again to the top and squirting it into his happy mouth. Within the half hour the dog was stumbling around like a drunkard and I had a bad feeling. “Look at him!” my mother said as he rolled onto his back, his four paws dangling uselessly in the air; he fell asleep there, in that posture, his sleep so deep he didn’t stir even when my brother stuck a straw up his nose and blew in. “Thank god,” my father said. “Let’s all get some rest,” and he turned in by nine o’clock, my mother curled on the couch with a comatose Tiny in her arms. That night I fell down a deep and dreamless hole, the lamplight glowing over the egg—which I did not once get up to check, as had been my practice over the weeks—the clock talking its endless ticks—none of it mattered as exhaustion grabbed me by the cuff and hauled me straight away to sleep land. I slept like someone pulled under a dock, the darkness complete, the next thing I knew my window rosy with anemic November light.