The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals

by Lauren Slater

  It is time, ladies.

  Let us all go galloping.

  Old Homes

  1: Kosher

  They might as well have been from the Isle of Skye. Or Australia, the Antarctic, what have you. Her hair was long and very blond, her skin so pale I could see the blue throb of a vein in the nook of her neck. Behind her hung a child, similarly pale, as pale as powder, with two long braids expertly woven, tied off at the ends with red ribbons. The child lingered at her mother’s legs. The summer sun glared on the stoop where I stood. I tried to peer behind the little girl, but the house was dark, the only light glinting off a gun hung on the wall.

  It was high summer, midafternoon, the cicadas creaking and my vinyl suitcase absorbing sun like a sponge so when I lifted the handle to step inside the plastic seared my skin. I abruptly dropped the suitcase. From behind me I felt my father—go now—his hand at the small of my back. The woman motioned me in. The powder girl sniffed, swiped her nose, held up her hand, a long string of glisten webbing her thumb and first finger. Go now, he said.

  And so I went.

  I was shown to my room. The house was already crammed with children, none of them strays, like me, but several of them with questionable connections to one another: steps and halves, which made me think of a girl sliced down her center, half her mouth missing. I was neither step nor half but foster, sent from the state, which is maybe—though I doubt it—why I got the smallest room, under the eave at the right end of the house, a room so small if I spun in its center my outstretched hands brushed the walls, which themselves were busted and bulging with all manner of mysterious cracks. Generations of different people with different tastes had left those horse-haired walls piled high with paper flaking off here and there, revealing new patterns beneath old patterns beneath city scenes beneath boats on lakes and boys with balls. Built in 1774, the old arthritic house groaned and sighed at night, hunkering its sore summer-baked body more deeply into the dirt, and I’d lie there in that new old little bed and sometimes it seemed I was spinning so fast I’d have to steady myself on the warbling walls. Other times those walls seemed to speak to me, to beckon me, and I’d spend hours past midnight peeling off paper to see what lay beneath. I remember finding grapevines whose twisted paths I could trace with my finger, up and down and around, up and down and around, over and over again, a rhythmic, almost melodic movement of mind and body that reminded me of riding and eventually sent me to sleep. In the first summer month of my three-year stay with that family, my dreams seemed always sparse, my slumber all static, an occasional stick figure or single tree appearing over and over again. I’d wake most mornings parched, a bedside fan churning the boggy air, their tap water tasting tinny as I drained it down.

  I became the Trevor family’s foster child in August of 1978, at the age of fifteen, just when, as I’d predicted several years before, during that first summer at Flat Rock Farm, my passion for horses was passing, in its place mementos, like the pink and red ribbons I’d brought with me to the Trevors, stuffed into the bottom of my suitcase. The date and name of the show was ink-stamped on the oval, on its back, proof that the past had happened, that the people and things I’d loved could not be completely erased. What scared me was how fast faces faded from my mind. I’d sit on my bed in the Trevors’ house and hold those ribbons hard, but my grip, it seemed, was gone, Rose a slashing shadow, my mother a sound without shape.

  That was the summer a heat wave had descended upon the city and its suburbs, the lawns turning taupe, the gardens all beds of brown. Wherever you looked you saw a hot, whitened world. From a distance people appeared as though they were wavering, their bodies uncertain, as if they might never materialize. Air conditioners rattled in windows all up and down the street, but in the Trevors’ house it was quiet and close, the circuitry too old to support so much wattage, the windows all open and the white curtains flapping like flags in the thick air.

  Instead of central air or window units, the Trevors reclined on lounge chairs under their large grape arbor, bottles of wine in a bucket of ice, long-stemmed glasses on a low table before them. I watched Cranston, my foster father, lift a corked bottle by its dripping neck and with exaggerated elegance—du vino pour la femme and les petites?—pop the top and pour the liquid for Annie and himself, and then in still smaller amounts for all the children, encouraging us to savor the stuff before swallowing. “Go ahead,” Cranston said to me when he saw how I was hesitant, and so I did, if only to obey. I stepped up to the table and held a giant goblet by its skinny stem. “Now take a sip,” Cranston said, and so I did, a small sip, a sharp tang, my eyes tearing and my nose filling up with flavor. A second sip and my skin seemed to shed its outer layers so now I could feel beneath the heat the barest breezes stirring. After my third sip, Annie removed the glass from my hand and said, “Enough is enough,” which was true, for the wine had moved up my spine and kept hitching my head higher.

  Perhaps the wine was their secret, for Annie and Cranston, my foster parents, shrugged off the heat as though it were an unwanted piece of clothing, their skin fresh and dry even as the thermometer inched into the nineties, the humidity turning the air to jam. At sundown the family would steam mussels on the porch, prying them open and sucking the innards down, tossing the hitched shells into the bushes. “Compost,” Cranston announced each time he lobbed his leftovers, but I had no idea what he meant. Where I was from, we didn’t eat shellfish—it wasn’t kosher—so when Cranston offered me a mussel, I felt I had to say no. Still, I watched them all closely. I saw the opened shells, the oily glimmer of the packed fish inside. I saw how they tipped back their heads and, using the shell like a spoon, sucked down the steamed meat, a little trigger bobbing in their throats when they swallowed.

  Annie and Cranston, along with their five children, were connoisseurs of a certain kind of lifestyle for which there is no easy word. To say they knew the art of relaxation would be far too simple a summation. Annie’s kitchen was packed with cookbooks and she’d labor over them for hours, but always humming as she worked, a small smile on her face as she read the recipes and then altered them to suit her taste, the big wooden spoon lifted to her lips, a thoughtful pause as she stared into some distance I could not name, and then a sudden swerve as she added more chives or a dash of dark pepper. “Try some,” she’d say, wanting to draw me in, and obediently I’d try, and obediently I’d stare, my head cocked as though in thought. “Well,” Annie would finally ask. “What do you think it needs?” I could never answer. Where I was from, meals were not for fun. A portion dropped on the floor might bring a bruise. You put your fork to your food and lifted with all the care you could muster. No one cocked their heads and mused about spice while the kitchen window clouded from some steam. “What do you think it needs?” Annie would repeat, perhaps confused by my silence and I’d stammer, “Salt?” every time.

  I don’t think there’s a reason for everything, but if I did I might say God—not some system or the state—but God matched me with the Trevors because they were everything I was not. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say their household was everything mine was not. I was Jewish. The Trevors were blue-blooded Brahmins. I’d grown up celebrating the Shabbat on Friday evenings, lighting candles and singing the Schma, my mother with a covering over her head, which was bowed in unusual deference, her hands for once not fisted. The Trevors knew nothing about Friday nights, instead serving their Sabbath on Sunday, at the odd hour of 3 p.m., so by evening you were done with the whole thing and had nothing to do but watch the red disc of that summer sun flare behind the trees you could see from the window.

  As a Kosher girl I didn’t eat shellfish, but the Sabbath pork I was willing to try, stabbing it with my fork and sawing sideways, the whole family watching me as I lifted a small slab to my mouth, took it in with my teeth, chewed for what seemed four hundred minutes, like chicken, a little, and unlike anything I knew, a lot, so after I’d swallowed I shrugged and, then, seeing their disappointed faces I said, �
��Tasty.”

  “Really?” asked Annie. “You liked it?”

  “I liked it,” I said.

  “She hated it,” said Kyle, one of their sons and my newly acquired foster brother. Kyle was sixteen and so blond he was almost white.

  “I did not hate it,” I said, but suddenly I wanted to cry.

  “It’s nothing to get upset about,” Cranston said. “There’s always PB and J.”

  “Who’s upset?” I said, but my voice gave me away. It got snagged on something and then there were tears. Why? What for? I wasn’t sure. Later on, alone in my room, I thought about this clan, their wine, their pork, the way they loved to lounge beneath the leafy shade of their own vines. I thought about how their antique house stood out on a street of small square boxes and tidy lawns, the gardens all preplanned except for theirs, packed with run-away perennials and spires higher than my head. Cranston, a history buff, insisted that all the children under his roof memorize the names of the kings of England from the fourteenth century on, a pedagogical plan no one paid much mind to. Still, at night the entire family read together, two parents, six kids—counting me— everyone sitting around the dinner table with a book, no noise except for the turning of a page or a small sigh or some muted expression of delight or dismay. I’d bring a book down right along with everyone else, but my words seemed always senseless, scrambled, and I had the feeling I was up above, attached to no one or nothing, circling a place without pain, this home so singular and basically serene, I couldn’t see how to settle.

  Pain is a point, a direction, a signal; its presence assures one’s existence in the world. You are alive because you hurt, or, similarly, you are alive because you hurt others. In my mother’s house, pain was a language that overrode all other kinds of communiqués. Thus I learned to live with a heightened awareness that put my every sensory organ on alert. I listened to the sound of footfalls coming closer, now going away; lying awake at night, I heard her making her way down the hall, a shadow gliding over my sheet. I was nourished on danger, and rage too, a heady brew that brings the world to its brilliant boiling point for hours of every day; and you come to need it that way. You lose the casual manner of living, how many make their way through, tasting a little of this, a little of that, the music on low, the page turning slowly, some sustaining story emerging. I knew nothing of this sort of sanity. Thus the Trevors were aliens to me, and I could not adjust to their territory. It was so much more than pork on Sunday or mussels packed in a striated shell. It was a style of living on land that I had never seen before—wacky, happy, harmless. It left me empty and disoriented, longing for my long-lost poison. I missed my mother, yes. I missed more her atmosphere, all arrows and opera, with a little bit of blood here and there.

  2: Holes

  The house was old and had many holes. Not all the windows had screens. Once that summer a starling flew into Annie and Cranston’s bedroom, went round and round in circles near the ceiling and then abruptly flew out, leaving his bird dirt here and there on the floor. The family had a dog named Bruno and a tabby cat named Mince, who gave us eight mewling kittens at the end of June. We found a chipmunk living in the cupboard and mice sometimes streaked across the floor, disappearing behind baseboards or under beds. The heat broke with a crack, and rain came crashing down and after that the air was as fresh as something scrubbed, the day shining at its edges. Then the temperature soared again. From my window in the morning I could see steam rising off the red roofs tented up and down the streets, and the streets were strange to me, and stayed strange, because I resisted exploration. A few times, in the evenings after dinner, I agreed to walk with Kyle the short distance into town and we bought ice cream cones from a store called Barbar Jean’s, but mostly I stayed inside, citing the heat as my excuse. The truth was I’d never liked newness. I was the type of kid who would read the same book over and over again, who compulsively chewed the inside of my cheek in the precise same spot, who, even at fifteen years of age, still had to close the closet door once the lights were out for fear of the beasts in there. Walking with Kyle in the torpid early evening we passed the old abandoned house four doors down, the yard there sandy, filled with feral cats and crooked crab grass. The cats were so starved I could see each individual rib and as the day darkened their eyes stood out like stars, some circling, others staying still.

  Living mostly within, I read my books and, when no one was at home, explored the Trevors’ house, which in both its spirit and its setup bore no resemblance to the one I’d come from, a contemporary my mother kept maniacally clean, even her wallpaper washable. My father—a passive man with none of my mother’s verve or nerve—my father had always claimed that my mother had changed once her babies were born, that before her pregnancies she’d been carefree, and I have a picture that suggests he was correct. In it my mother is young, not much more than twenty, and she wears a paisley kerchief tied beneath her chin, some stray curls blowing in a swift sea breeze as behind her a massive ocean moves. Her mouth a festive red, she purses her painted lips in a coy kiss-me pose as somewhere in time the camera clicks and captures this second self. Once the babies came, my father always explained, so too did her unhappiness, her rages growing right along with me, her once playful smile crimped into a curve beneath which stewed a sadness for something I could never salve, in her or in myself. Social Services got involved a few summers after horse camp, when, without distraction or passion, forbidden by my mother to continue the only out I knew—riding—I began to cut myself, the red rents some primitive sort of signal as hurt and help entwined in my mind.

  I missed her, even though. It was she I thought of—and tried to conjure—as I explored the Trevors’ old home, opening their medicine cabinets, palming their pills, unscrewing the tops of mysterious glass bottles with alien scents inside. I tried on Annie and Cranston’s reading glasses, hooking the rims behind my ears, my held-up hand suddenly huge and pink and misty, not mine. What was? Once, climbing high into the Trevors’ attic, I found a dwarf-sized door that opened into a closet, inside canes hanging on hooks and scrawled on the dingy wall mysterious signatures—Harry Mumford, Faith Mason, Robert Smutter, Earl Greylot—people who had come before me. Over the old beehive oven hung that gun, a rifle really, a relic from the Civil War and part of Cranston’s antiques collection that included pink and black butterflies preserved under glass, copper chamber pots gone green round their rims, and dusty medical books picturing midgets and giants, those pages so old they flaked away in my fingers.

  Houses never rest; I knew that, but this was a house especially full of chatter. I could hear the mice, the mosquitos, the cats crying, the signatures scrawling, and then sometimes from within the walls the sound of large mammals making their way; I heard as they tumbled above me, their play so raucous that bits of my ceiling sifted down, and I heard as they walked right by my bed, nothing between us but cracked plaster, paint, and paper. “Racoons,” Annie said when I asked her. “They live in the walls here.” She held out a spoon. “Give me a taste test,” she said.

  Every night now they came, walking in the wall beside my bed, so close to my ear I thought I could hear them breathe. I started to scratch at that space, trying to widen a tiny puncture already present. Plaster snowed onto my sheets. I found an X-acto knife in the desk in my room and, after checking to see that my door was closed, I used its precise point to trace a small porthole. Flexing my first finger, I gave the wall a push, surprised at how cleanly it all gave way. The hole I’d made was quarter sized and perfect for peering.

  I turned out my light. I peered in. From far down the wall I heard the tell-tale lumbering of a single coon. He came closer and closer still, and then I could smell him, pungent and moist, and then I could hear him chuffing as he ambled, closer and closer still, my heart picking up, and suddenly, for the first time, I felt like I lived here, like I was pinned to this place that was silent with sleep except for me, still staring as his smell grew stronger and then, quite suddenly it seemed, he came arou
nd some corner and I was eye to eye with a beast.

  The eye I saw had a wet shine, with a dark ink drop of a pupil. The pupil seemed suspended in liquid, and when the coon blinked I saw its lashes, thick and tar-black. “How goes it?” I asked and because he didn’t care to answer or perhaps had other business to do, the animal suddenly vanished, and I found myself staring at space.

  Every night I waited at my porthole for communion with the coon. And every night the animal and I did nothing but simply sit and stare at one another. Still, it seemed to fulfill some need for both of us and then, abruptly, it was over. I would look away, look back and the beast would be gone, or the beast would blink several times in rapid succession and then, without further ado, ramble off. Whenever it happened that way I felt somehow stung, or sniped, and in response I reached for the X-acto knife, closing it in my grip. It was always late, midnight or plenty past. I sometimes tried to picture how this house would look from the street, every window black but mine, the one way off to the right, a cube of marigold. The coon had left. Alone, my hand closed round the stem of the knife, leaning in close to the hole and then bringing the blade up. Sometimes just then my eye caught sight of the moon outside; it was huge that June, swollen, indecent, and so close it seemed I could cup it. It was the exact same moon that hung over my real home, no more than twenty miles from here but seeming so much farther. I pictured a person awake there just as I was awake here, seeing that light in the sky and wondering if I was too. My mother? No. My father? He’d gone to Egypt. My siblings? Scattered in different schools. This moon was mine alone. And knowing that, and thinking that, I’d lean close to the hole I’d made in the wall and sculpt it larger, cutting crescents out of it until, one night, a pointed nose emerged from my aperture, leathery but wet, two dark dots for nostrils and then a tiny tongue. Slowly, I offered my upturned palm and the snout pushed further out, eagerly taking in my myriad scents, so many it seemed I had, because the snout just went on sniffing, salt and sand and who knows what else lay in the layers of me. This went on for I’m not sure how long, because when I woke up the coon was gone and I’d apparently slept slumped against the wall with my hand held out like an offering.