TUBBY TATERS
Just as for years Emily had been steadily losing weight, at her own mortal peril, Rufus had been steadily gaining it. He’d always been voracious, a beggar and a scrounger, a connoisseur of garbage. Emily thought it only natural that as his metabolism slowed he’d thickened, since he did nothing but sleep all day. Mornings he stationed himself at the far end of the dining room, taking the sun by the French doors. He lay stretched on his side in a rhombus of light, perfectly serene. She was busy planting annuals, bustling in and out with muddy flats, and his boneless contentment provoked her. “Hey, Tubby,” she called on her way past. “You still with us?”
She had a dozen names she teased him with. Big Boy. Le Grand Elephant. Mr. Toofus McBoofus. He’d always been a clown, and now that he was old and grumpy, he was an easy target.
Lately, though, she’d begun to worry about him. Betty noticed it. She wasn’t joking: over the last few weeks he seemed to have gotten bigger. His stiff hips were padded with fat, his rear end broad as a hassock. On their walks, before they even reached the corner of Sheridan, he was panting, and at night, beached on his side, he gurgled as if his lungs were full of fluid. His chest was heavy, and felt lumpier to Emily, though Dr. Magnuson said the hard nodes under his coat were just fatty cysts typical of a springer his age. When she called him in from outside, he no longer raced for the door and spun around for a treat, just waddled across the yard like a bear, his head down, his shoulders rolling.
“Betty’s right,” she said. “You are a mess.”
His back left leg was weak. Climbing the stairs, he had trouble gaining traction on the polished wood, and sometimes stopped halfway as if he were stuck.
“Keep going,” she said behind him, ready to intervene. “You can do it. Come on, one more. Good boy.”
He wasn’t much better going down, frog-hopping his back feet to the next step, and then the next.
Still he tried to shadow her around the house like he used to, unable to break their routine. After breakfast he liked to follow her up and lie across her feet while she brushed her teeth.
“No, Boo-Boo, you stay here,” she said. “I’m coming right back.”
Kenneth suggested stick-on carpet treads, Margaret a baby gate.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do when he can’t get up and down the stairs.”
“How about one of those chairs on a rail?” Margaret said.
“I’m serious.”
“Can’t you just put his bed downstairs?”
“He wouldn’t be happy,” Emily said. “I wouldn’t be happy.”
“He’s had a good life.”
“He has.”
“All you can do is make him comfortable.”
“I know,” Emily said, aware that on some plane they were talking about her.
She worried that he was in pain and she was being selfish. Ever since Margaret was a toddler they’d had a dog, usually two, and to contemplate life with no companion of any sort was awful.
She gave him his fish-oil pills like she was supposed to, though they did nothing. More than ever, he reminded her of Duchess near the end. He had trouble getting up, his paws slipping and scrabbling, his back end collapsing several times before she could cross the room and lift him.
“I know, pal,” she said. “It’s not easy.”
For all his problems, he was still interested in his food. He could still catch his treats, he still slopped water from his dish all over the kitchen floor. On hot days he still liked to go outside and lie on the cool concrete of the back porch. He slept with the thin tip of his tongue protruding as if he were dead—something he’d never done before, and which upset her deeply. In the midst of her work, she stopped and peered at his rib cage to make sure he was still breathing. What would she do if he wasn’t?
He had a checkup scheduled for next Tuesday, but during their morning walk on Friday he lay down on the sidewalk in front of the Millers’ and wouldn’t get up. She called the vet to see if she could bring him in. They said yes, by all means. She had to ask Jim Cole to lift him into the back of the Subaru, and then had to help.
On the way there she realized that unlike the end of Duchess, there was no one to appeal to, that the responsibility was hers alone. If she had to put him down, she would, regardless of whether she was ready.
At the vet’s, Michael and an assistant lifted him out, slinging him between them like a sack.
In February he’d weighed sixty-six pounds. Now, four months later, he was just over ninety-two.
“Oh, buddy,” Michael crooned, “what is going on with you?”
“So I’m not being alarmist.”
“I’d be alarmed too. A dog his size shouldn’t be this big.”
While the assistant held the leash, Dr. Magnuson had Rufus sit and then stand. “Thank you. I appreciate you being so patient with me.” The doctor ran his big hands over his haunches, cupped his paw and extended his weak leg. Rufus looked back and growled low in his throat.
“I understand,” the doctor said, patting him. “I wouldn’t be happy either if I were you.”
“Could it be from when he fell?” Emily asked.
“I seriously doubt it. Anything structural would have presented right away. The real problem is his weight, because now everything has to work that much harder. Anytime you see a rapid weight gain like this, there’s usually something else going on. I’d like to run some tests, but from everything you’ve told me, I suspect his thyroid isn’t producing like it should be. It’s relatively common in the breed, and again, at his age things break down. The good news is that if this is what I think it is, we write him a prescription, we put him on a diet, and he feels better in a month or so.”
His thyroid. Like Aunt June with her iodine pills. She was so sure he was dying that, while she was grateful for this possibility, at first she didn’t believe the diagnosis. It only sank in on the way home, and then she felt horrible for not realizing he was sick. She announced the news to the children as if his life had been spared.
All weekend she prayed the doctor was right, and was grateful when the tests confirmed it. A normal thyroid level was around thirty. His was two. She quoted the results to Betty and Arlene and Marcia as if it were a miracle he was alive. It was. She certainly hadn’t earned this reprieve.
From then on she monitored his progress like a nurse, coating his pills with fat-free cream cheese and spending extra for the senior formula in cans. Instead of Milk-Bones and Liv-R-Snaps, she gave him celery sticks, which he crunched as if they were treats. Morning and evening she walked him up and down Grafton, regardless of the weather, encouraging him at every step. She was sure the neighbors thought she was senile, a crazy old lady out talking to her dog in the pouring rain.
She praised him for eating, for pooping, for lying there quietly. “Yes,” she said, “you’re a good boy,” and scratched behind his ears, ruffled his chest, rubbed his belly. She wiped his rheumy eyes and made him sit still while she cleaned his ears with a Q-tip. She bent and pressed her nose to the top of his head, taking in his scent. She was aware that she was doting on him, but didn’t care.
Betty thought he looked better, and while he still had trouble with the stairs, little by little his wind returned. One morning when Emily let him in from outside he gamboled across the kitchen, spun around and huffed, his plume of a tail wagging.
“Look at you,” she said. “Someone’s feeling better.”
Mr. Feisty, she called him, Mr. Excitable, and ultimately, when he was back to his normal size, Mr. Pork Pie, and Chubbers McBubbers, but lovingly. When she came home from buying him canned food and found he’d pooped in the living room, she cleaned it up without rancor, and when he barked at the mailman, or the doorbell, or nothing at all, she was more amused than cross.
“Rufus Jamison Maxwell,” she said, “what in the world am I going to do with you?”
CYD CHARISSE
She was wrong about the Millers’. The Tuesday after Father’s
Day, as Emily watched from her living room window, the realtor pulled up in her Mercedes, and with the fussiness of a decorator, centering the placard and then standing back to admire her work, crowned the Howard Hanna sign with a smaller one that announced a sale was pending.
Emily had had more than fair warning that this could happen, so it wasn’t a shock, and yet, as depressing as the house sitting empty was, in some way this was worse, being both sudden and final, as if, like Henry and then Louise, it too had been taken from her.
As with any upsetting piece of news, her first instinct was to share it with those closest to her, except Kenneth and Margaret were both at work. She hesitated to call Arlene, thinking her sympathies wouldn’t run as deep, but when she knocked on the Coles’ door there was no answer, and she needed to tell someone of her discovery while it was still fresh.
“That’s so funny,” Arlene said. “I was about to call you. I just heard on the radio: Cyd Charisse died.”
“Cyd Charisse.”
“The dancer.”
“I know Cyd Charisse.”
“Remember her in Singing in the Rain, with Gene Kelly? I loved the way they danced together. And Silk Stockings? I must have seen that a dozen times. She was so elegant and mysterious. I wanted to be just like her.”
Stymied, Emily wanted to say that at no time in her life had Arlene been anything like Cyd Charisse, and yet, despite herself, Emily recalled watching Cyd Charisse and Fred Astaire from the balcony of the Penn Royal and wishing that someday she would be that much in love, and that beautiful, and if the mystery now seemed as canned and schmaltzy as the old Tin Pan Alley songs they moved to, it did nothing to diminish the romance of sitting in the dark and wanting to be up on the screen, living another, infinitely richer life. She didn’t want to be Cyd Charisse, she just wanted to believe the feelings she was feeling were true, and would be waiting for her when she found the man she loved, because outside of the Penn Royal she’d never felt them.
“I always wanted to be Gene Tierney,” Emily said.
“She was lovely. What was the one with what’s-his-name? Dana Andrews. Where he was a detective.”
“You mean Laura.”
“Yes! Remember the theme song? Doo do-do dooo.”
“I do,” Emily said, “thank you.”
“Sorry. I’ve been listening to this tribute and getting all misty. What did you want to tell me?”
“I was calling,” Emily said as preface, “to let you know the Millers’ sold.”
“Good,” Arlene said. “It’s about time, right?”
“I suppose so.”
“I wonder what they got for it.”
“I’m sure it’ll be in the paper.”
“What was it listed for?”
She went on to speculate, but Emily had lost interest, and wondered, once she got off, how she’d ever let herself get caught up in Arlene’s ramblings. She had her own losses to mourn without Cyd Charisse. She’d been in love as deeply as anyone, and if Henry wasn’t exactly dashing, he was honest and kind and smart, and besides, what good was it now to compare her life to the movies? The whole idea was inane. Phone in hand, she circled the coffee table, finally stopping by the window, where she could see the sign. On a flyer she tried Kenneth, and then didn’t leave a message.
IMPROVEMENTS
In retrospect, she was foolish to think they might hold off until she’d made her getaway, but why did they have to choose the height of July? She was so close to leaving, so tired of the stifling weather. She didn’t need this mess on top of everything else.
The Millers were lucky to sell when they did. The letter notifying her arrived on Friday, and by Tuesday the place was a war zone, dump trucks idling outside, making the windows shake. Rufus barked as if they were being attacked. To replace an ancient terra-cotta sewer line, the water company was taking up a swath of street and sidewalk all the way down to Highland, including the tongue of her driveway. She felt surrounded, the house an island. They suggested affected residents park on Sheridan or Farragut, meaning Emily would have to leave the Subaru not just at the mercy of the elements but where she couldn’t see it. Her other option was to lock it in the garage and depend on Arlene, the prospect of which felt like a trap. They gave her no timetable—it was possible they’d be there all summer—and so she found a spot on Sheridan not too close to the stop sign but far enough from the big sycamores so they wouldn’t shed directly on it, and then, thinking of the Olds, spent several minutes trying to tuck it into the curb, scraping one rim in the process.
There was no escape from the noise, even with the house sealed against the heat. They had to break up the street, and all day long the saws whined, biting through the asphalt, opening seams for jackhammers and backhoes and finally workmen who climbed down into the trenches and squared them off with shovels. The trucks kicked up dust which settled on her hedges, powdering the porch rail and the mailbox like white pollen. She went out to water the garden, but ducked right back in again, fearing for her lungs.
It was too hot anyway. It was the muggy heart of summer, when the air upstairs was as thick as their old attic, and she emptied the dehumidifier twice a day. At night she opened her windows and turned on her table fan, but it just made noise, and she lay there sweltering in the sheets, wishing she could sleep. These were the moments she missed Chautauqua the most, with its cool evenings. When the children were little, she spent the entire month at the cottage, Henry driving up on Friday after work and back down Sunday night. The week itself was quiet, a time to read on the dock while the children frolicked. They lounged around the screen porch, played croquet in the shade of the big oak. Late afternoon, as the heat deepened, clouds massed to the north, thunderheads piling skyward until they could hold no more and storms banged down the lake, bringing relief. After dinner the children needed their sweatshirts. By bedtime some nights they’d have a fire going, and while the new place wasn’t the same—a cramped and charmless rental just above the Institute, set well back from the water—dusk still fell like the dusk she and Henry had paddled out into that very first summer after the war. In two weeks she would be back there, and happy. Until then she just had to make the best of things.
By law they couldn’t start before eight in the morning. She was naturally awake at five, and used these free hours to walk Rufus and water her garden. The first few days she holed up inside, as if she could wait them out, all the while chafing at her confinement. She felt as if she were under house arrest, though she realized it was mostly self-imposed. She was free to leave, but really, where was she supposed to go?
Kersey, to see her parents one last time. With the new car she had no excuse not to.
The answer hurt, and directly she dismissed it, offering up a concession. She would go see Henry—Louise too. What she’d do with the rest of the day she had no idea. She wasn’t going to hang out at the library like a homeless person, despite their air-conditioning.
Henry was less than ten minutes away, Louise just another five. Emily was overdue for a visit, and still, day after day, she put it off, as if by stalling she might wriggle out of it somehow. She’d go after she came back from Chautauqua. Surely it wouldn’t make any difference to them. As logical as that sounded, Emily recognized it for a lie. In the evenings the bulldozers and backhoes sat idle by the curb, drawing out the curious, and each night as she watched the neighborhood children and their fathers circle the stilled machines, she scolded herself for wasting another day, yet the next morning, overrun once more, she found herself resisting, and finally it was only by writing his name down on the calendar as if they had a date that she made herself go.
HARD TO KILL
She needed something that could take the heat. The Maxwells’ plot lay on the southern face of a knoll overlooking a large ornamental pond crowned with lily pads, and while the view was desirable, and serene, besides a few flowering pear trees the slope was bare. Even in the beginning, when she’d visited faithfully, no matter how often she watered
, the sun burned up the geraniums she planted, the wilted petals reminding her, every Sunday, of their shared helplessness before the elements. She understood there was nothing she could do short of being there daily, yet even now, as a gardener, she couldn’t resign herself to the sacrifice. At the same time she couldn’t very well show up empty-handed. After much consultation with Mike Hornek at the nursery, she settled on a potted cosmos, one each for Henry and Louise. If it rained at all while she was away at Chautauqua, at least they’d have a fighting chance.
To get to the cemetery she had to drive through Garfield, a neighborhood she avoided on principle. The cheap Italian restaurants she and Henry haunted in college were gone, reduced to nail salons and storefront churches, the sidewalks dotted with litter. From her speakers, Albinoni purled on incongruously.
She should have asked Arlene to come. The thought had been nagging at her since she’d made up her mind to go, and while she was utterly justified—of all her errands, this was the most private—in the past year they’d grown so yoked that she couldn’t rid herself of the feeling that she was somehow cheating Arlene.
It was nearly ten, by the clock on the dash. She’d timed her arrival to coincide with the gates opening, and as she eased from light to light through the ravaged main drag, she was surprised to find, besides a few hefty women clumped at bus stops, the usual ne’er-do-wells loitering in doorways, waiting for earlybirds. She kept her eyes front, and was relieved to finally turn in at the pillars and leave behind the world of the living.
Inside, the orderly past reigned. The slate-roofed Gothic chapel with its rosette window and verdigris-streaked downspouts might have been shipped stone by stone from the high moors of Yorkshire. The lawns were groomed smooth as fairways, each tree and shrub lovingly tended, their shadows dark and sharp in the clear morning light. There was no one around, the only motion a bright cardinal flitting across the road and lighting on a snowball tree, which she took as a good sign.
Emily, Alone Page 24
