“Birch Street,” I said. “321.”
“321 Birch Street?” the man said, tilting his head in thought. “Isn’t that where Cranston and Annie Trevor live?”
“That’s right,” I said.
The man stared at me. “You’re not one of theirs,” he said. “Are you?”
“Yes,” I said, and then, confused I added, “I mean no.”
The man raised one eyebrow and then slowly, his stare still solidly on me, he reached into his shirt pocket and slid out a second cigarette, placing it between his lips before snapping a match into flame.
“Yes and no?” he repeated, and then said nothing, letting the silence amplify the absurdity of my answer.
“I mean,” I said, but in fact I didn’t know what I meant, or how to explain what it was to be both in and out of a family, to belong but on the cusp. The man opened his mouth and smoke emptied into the air. It was like my systems shut down. All I could do was shrug.
“Linda,” the man called, still staring straight at me. “Hey, Linda. We’ve got a girl with a raccoon out here.”
Linda—she must have been his wife—came to the door, wiping her hands on a washcloth. “Good god,” she said.
“Name’s Amelia,” I said.
“Your name is Amelia,” the woman asked, “or is that what you call your raccoon?”
“Raccoon,” I said. “I call the raccoon Amelia.” As if on cue Amelia scuttled down my arm and leapt to the ground.
“And your name is?” Linda asked.
“Lauren,” I said, and then added after a beat, “Slater.”
“Lauren Slater here is telling me that she’s living with Annie and Cranston and their bunch up on Birch Street,” the man said, and then he scratched the bald dome of his head as though this were the most confusing thing in the world.
The woman peered at me over the porch railing, and then, suddenly, a soft smile. “You must be their new au pair,” she said. She turned to her husband. “Annie Trevor told me not even a year ago, when we ran into each other at DeMoulas, how she was thinking of bringing in a girl from overseas.”
And then suddenly it all came clear, how to tell this story. “That’s right,” I said, and I smiled up at the couple. “I’m from Ireland. I came to see your country.”
The man looked visibly relieved. He pulled on his cigarette and said, “I’d offer you one, but here in our country we have laws about that.”
“Not a problem,” I said and then, suddenly, the man said, leaning forward, his voice dropping down, half whisper, half hiss: “You know, you don’t have much of an accent for a girl from Ireland.”
“American schools,” I said, thinking quickly. “My parents sent us kids.”
The man rocked back in his heels and I could practically hear him chewing on what I said, trying to decide whether to believe me or—
“You from the city,” he said, “or are you—”
“Country,” I said, before he could finish his sentence. Suddenly I was filled with exhilaration. Whatever I said I saw, emerald fields dotted with bright red barns, gold cubes of hay stacked in the sunlight, laundry on a line, the wind perfect. “At the base of some of the biggest mountains around,” I added, and then there were mountains too, rumpled across the skyline, their tops lost in mist, mine. I told them how in my homeland I walked in forests with huge fronds, berries bright against stalks. And as I talked I learned, right then and there, the freedoms I could claim. Cut loose from a clear category, I could construct my own—at least it seemed that way to me—even as I felt my world warble the way it does when living a lie, no matter how swift or small. “We had horses,” I said, my voice suddenly small, the reversal rapid, all my gladness gone, the flowers flabby in my arms.
“Horses,” the man said. He looked entranced now, the woman askance. “That’s quite something,” she said, “living out there in the fields and forests like that. I imagine this here must all seem incredibly tame to you.”
I looked around me. Trash blew in the breeze. The railroad tresses were rotted, the tracks bars of black. All of a sudden I was seized with a panic it took me a second to make sense of. Amelia was gone, had wandered off while I talked, the grasses behind me so high all I could see were their feathered tips. “Amelia Airheart!” I called, and then I waited for her sound in the stalks, nothing. “Amelia,” I called again, my hands cupped around my mouth, a sick feeling inside me. “I’ve gotta go,” I said, and even though not much more than a second had passed I’d already cemented my lie to her loss, which meant she wouldn’t be back. When I finally found her at the fringe of the field, chewing on a stick, I grabbed hold of her fur—hard.
4: The Cupboard
In real life, the Trevors lived in a town in southern Maine, on a semi-busy street, in that old, old rambling house set on a grassy plot with two one-hundred-year-old fruit trees that flowered first and then bore peaches so soft that they bruised before falling from the branches. Bees feasted on the rotting pulp. In the evenings, once the bees were gone, I followed Amelia to the trees and watched her eat the goop left on the ground while I wandered around, picking up peach stones and studying their surfaces with my thumb. Cut free from my family of origin and a home gone gothic with dread, those peach pits interested me simply because I could see them.
And I saw other things as well, as though my actual eyes were changing, my vision, trained for terror, for trauma, for large sweeping scales, now narrowing in on plain everyday objects and experiences previously hidden from me. The peach pits. Dust furred on the rim of a cup. The pleasures of picnicking, which Amelia introduced me to, down by a pond stocked with carp. Annie provided us with the basket, but I’d insist on packing it, slowly sifting through their cupboards, holding up the glass woman full of salt and the glass man full of pepper, sniffing the cinnamon stored in a perforated tin. In my mother’s home we weren’t allowed to loll about in the pantry, so this too was new for me, and strange, and strangely delightful, canned cherries floating in fluid—May I have one? Help yourself—Annie watching as I, raccoon-like, fished about with my fingers, pulling two up by their black stems, dropping my head back and popping them in my mouth. I found the nutmeg, the dried packets of milk, the caramel sauces, and split peas packed in air-tight canisters that made a sucking sound when I opened them. Their fridge yielded up bibbed lettuce, tomatoes on the vine, wedges of chocolate cake, and wheels of cheese coated in a thick white wax. Piece by piece I’d decide what to bring, usually mozzarella—a favorite of Amelia’s—plus enormous quantities of grapes, the fat purple kind, with juice as dark as iodine inside.
Basket packed, we’d walk off into the woods, laying a towel down by the pond, Amelia immediately crouching at its edge, ready to fish for her supper. Although the pond was stocked she always waited a good long time, looking, I assumed, for the perfect catch, while I lay there watching the sun cross the sky. Something uncoiled in me in those woods with Amelia, something long held hard and tight, a plaque of protection; I lay it down for a while and learned what life was like lived at a slower, lower level. I thought of Amelia fishing, or the Trevors all reading around a table at night, or Cranston polishing his antique pots, patient and quiet, the rag dark with dirt as he worked sometimes for hours in pursuit of something small. I still missed that high-stakes, home-grown fright; I’d be lying to say otherwise. But by poking a hole in the Trevors’ wall, it seemed I’d opened up a separate space inside of me as well, a space I could sense, and almost see, like a cupboard waiting within me, and inside that cupboard: A cane. A comb. A stone. Sometimes I’d open the cupboard door to find an old woman sewing; other times I’d see grass that went back and back and dim in the distance a piebald pony grazing. I never knew what I’d find in there, or why; it’s only now, years and years later that I see what united these objects was their quotidian character, the plain and quiet kind of plenty you miss when walking on a wire.
When Amelia came to us she was wild, but within twenty-four hours it seemed to me she’d consent
ed to tameness. I had no way of knowing that this was untrue. I didn’t understand that when Amelia followed me everywhere she was acting out of instinct, not fondness. Years later I would read the work of ethologist Konrad Lorenz, who made famous the fact that orphaned wild ducklings would cathect to the first person they saw when they struggled free from their shells, that person’s face indelibly imprinted on the infant animal’s most malleable brain. I’d see in Lorenz’s book photos of him walking like the Pied Piper, a long line of geese waddling behind him. Lorenz also discovered that if, upon birth, the wild geese first saw a boot in motion or a spoon in motion, they would imprint upon it with the same ferocious loyalty, longing only to be near the inanimate object, somehow sucking from it succor and safety, reflexively, without thought or plan.
Amelia, in other words, was not following me because she was tame and almost certainly not because she loved me; she followed me because some dumb inner drive urged her to do so, the drive itself as wild as wings or water. I didn’t feel in the least let down by this later-in-life discovery. What counted was not how I was loved. People often cite their pets as sources of “unconditional love,” but surely they must know, at some level, that Fido likely sees in them a food source, first and foremost. Does this diminish the encounter? Not at all. We adore our pets not because they love us, but because they prove to us, day after day after day, that we love them with a purity not possible in human-to-human encounters. Our animals prove to us how capacious the human heart can be, and in doing so they give us, over and over, a great gift.
5: Going Wild
Amelia, not a human, not by a long shot, began to grow, and with a wild alacrity. Her baby teeth disappeared, sliding from their slots, and in their place came fangs of polished white. Her claws, previously clear, grew cloudy and dark and so sharp she left pits in the pine of the Trevors’ antique floors when she walked over them. Her fur changed too, not in color but in hue, the bristles tipped with gold and blue. Yes, Amelia grew. She grew and she grew and she grew and then August came and with it a series of changes that seemed sudden and severe. My raccoon expanded so swiftly in August that one day, and all of a sudden it seemed, she was too wide to perch on my shoulder. Soon after that her behaviors became odd and unpredictable. At times she would snarl at something I could not see: a scent, perhaps, her wet nose raised and quivering, catching imperceptible currents, her world loaded with lavender, hot tar, wet leaf, rotted loam, bone. She started to tear apart our trash, clawing open the big bellies of bags, raiding the compost, dragging dead things over the stoop, once a rabbit no bigger than my fist, its ears ripped. Neighbors began complaining of trashcans tipped, their garbage ransacked, their cats, they claimed, attacked. I tried to keep Amelia in at night but she paced the house, up and down, around and around, stopping to stare longingly out the window and then, cued by something we could never see, she’d go berserk, clawing at glass, cocking her head and then clawing again, and again, her cries so high and hard that eventually I’d let her go. I’d open the door and watch her romp off into the darkness, heading diagonally across the lawn, through the shrubs, up over the Raymonds’ chain-link fence, dropping down soundlessly onto the ground, going each and every time towards that old abandoned house, just four doors down, drawn there, over and over again, passing her nocturnal hours beneath its broken roof, or around its grounds; I wasn’t sure. Perhaps she had a beau there, or a group, or a gang, or maybe, there, she could fight with all the feral cats she wanted and no one cared. Deep in the middle of the night we sometimes heard the fights, shrieks and snarls and shatters. Every morning, the streets were strewn with trash and neighbors started leaving us protest notes.
I’d go there, come morning. I’d go to the abandoned house. I’d stand at the edge of the busted steps and whistle two highs and one low, our special signal, and every time, within seconds it seemed, Amelia would climb through a hole in the wrecked outer wall, slide down the siding, and amble towards me, blood on her whiskers, dried drops here and there. I don’t know why I never recoiled. Despite her outbursts, her pacing and scratching at glass, her ripping apart our trash, she never hurt us, never came close. Towards the whole Trevor family, she was nothing but unendingly affectionate, and I wonder if her sweetness seemed all the more so when set against her sometimes savage displays. Back home, I’d pour her milk in a yellow saucer and she’d delicately lap it up, chortle for more, and then climb into my lap, turning twice before wrapping into a coil and settling down to sleep.
“Soon,” said Cranston, “she’ll be too big to handle.”
“She’s already,” said Annie, “too big to handle.”
“She shouldn’t live here,” said Cranston. “It’s not right.”
“She doesn’t live here,” I said. “She sleeps at the haunted house.”
“She’s here every day,” Annie said.
“All day,” Cranston said.
“Inside,” Annie said.
“It’s inappropriate,” Cranston said.
“Dangerous,” Annie said.
If not now, they said. Then soon.
I went on a mission then. I needed to prove to people that it was possible to make a wild animal safe. I pedaled to the library in town where I found half a shelf dedicated to the topic of taming and training beasts. In 1852, I read, Sir Walter Rothschild, a British nobleman, had had a fleet of zebras shipped to him from Africa. Convinced he could tame them, he built a beautiful state-of-the-art barn and then hitched several of the equines to an impressive carriage whereupon, after cracking his long crop, he was taken for a ride through the cobblestoned streets of London, people stopping to stare as the carriage ricocheted past them. Dusting dirt off his trousers, Rothschild worked with his zebras day in and day out, surviving, I’m sure, grievous bites and backside bruises. Although Rothschild did eventually convince his zebras to haul some heavy loads, all in all the breed resisted his efforts, too severely stubborn for the whip or the bit. Still, many others tried after him, the zebra, because of its close connection to the horse, being an obvious beast-of-burden candidate.
The dog was the first domesticated animal, and the hamster probably the last, but in between, rodent and canine people, since the earliest civilizations, have been trying to domesticate dozens and dozens of animals: the cheetah, the kangaroo, the brown bear, the hyena, to name just a few.
As Jared Diamond tells us, of all 148 large mammalian species who inhabit this earth, only fifteen—sheep, goat, cow, pig, horse, Arabian camel, Bactrian camel, llama, alpaca, donkey, reindeer, water buffalo, yak, Bali cattle, and mithan—have proven amenable to domestication or the taming that precedes it. Zebras have that nasty temper and have probably sunk their teeth into more male hindquarters than we would care to count. Elephants, those gentle giants, mature too slowly, while deer and antelope panic in a pen. In general, only a handful of mammals are really fit for the farm or the human household; as for the rest, their encrypted temperaments render them perennially dangerous or just plain unsuitable, beyond the grasp of human hands.
I was just fifteen when I imbibed this sobering information, old enough to understand it but young enough to decide to discard it. Inside the library I made my way down the alphabet, riffling through the collection of books until I finally found what I was looking for. I read about a Portuguese prince who had successfully tamed a tiger and Pygmies who had, with great delight, taken wild pandas as pets.
In the days and weeks that followed I stayed on the lookout for similar stories, sampling libraries in surrounding towns, telling Annie and Cranston my research proved them wrong, while Annie and Cranston, caught between my deep need on the one hand and their common sense on the other, looked with escalating worry from Amelia to me, me to Amelia, day by day her contours coming clearer as her size, and her temper, increased. My aim: to make my raccoon into an animal other than what she was, this despite all the information I’d received. Who, after all, had taken me to meet my neighbors, or called me around corners I might have otherwise ju
st dodged? I had come to understand that adventure and adrenaline were not necessarily the same. Mostly I can credit Amelia, an animal who had no words, with helping me talk to the Trevors, so that first we became friends and then something else, one evening Annie reaching across some space to touch the back of my head, asking, softly, “Where’d you get this cut?” A few days later I went with her to a stylist, all three of us looking at books showing bobs and shags, bangs and layers, Annie sweeping my matted hair back, this way and that, considering me carefully in the mirror, as a mother might, and I woke up to a series of wants. I went down with a throat so swollen breathing became difficult, and Cranston brought me to the hospital in the middle of the night, his hand testing me for a fever, and my wants went wayward, turned into inevitable needs. Soon after that, lying across my bed beneath the eave one afternoon, the window open and autumn in the air, I realized that somehow, somewhere along the line, this room had come to feel like mine, and something in me settled, and then days later spilled when my social worker called and asked me about my placement. Placement, rhymes with basement, and I recalled, with a dull thud, a buried, bottom-line fact: everything about this family was fleeting for me. Unlike the zebra and the cheetah, I ached to be domesticated, tied and tethered to a single spot, but in fact I was radically free. Unlike a child by blood or adopted by law, the Trevors could, and eventually would, release me, and that fact seasoned my stay with anger and appreciation both.
The seasons changed; summer turned to fall turned to winter. One afternoon in the fading light of a December day, when all the trees in town were strung with tiny teardrop lights, I found on the kitchen counter a check from the state—the monthly payment for keeping me. I studied it for a long while, turned it over and over in my hands, and then, before I could stop myself, I crumpled it up and threw it in the basket by Annie’s desk. “Did you do this?” Annie later asked me, holding up the creased check.
The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals Page 16
