New Life, No Instructions

by Gail Caldwell

  Time is the sweet fog in which denial is wrapped. I had just seen Tula’s sister from a previous litter, now two years old, springing like a fifty-pound bouncing ball at Janice’s place. But I liked to believe I was ready for all of this. I had a fenced yard, the obligatory crates and baby gates, dozens of toys and training tools, years of experience. I had Shiloh, the four-year-old Belgian sheepdog down the street, and her owner, Peter, who had boundless energy and extraordinary instincts with animals. He and Shiloh had seen me through losing Clementine. “Be good to have a puppy around here,” he said more than once that summer, upon walking into my too-quiet house. “Want Shiloh for a while?”

  Now there was Tula: In the blink of an eye, it seemed, with simple letters and transactions and airplane flights, I had doubled the life force inside my house. For days after her arrival I reveled in this miracle. In the morning when I woke I heard her young breath, and then I opened my eyes and saw her looking at me from inside her crate by my bed, and I’d think, My God, there’s an animal in here, and the day would begin. All puppies are a marvel when first encountering the world: They hiccup; their breath smells like sunshine; they chase their own shadows and the heart seizes in return. The adorability quotient in the very young—those big heads, those doelike eyes—is as vital to their survival as the food drive.

  Introducing a Samoyed puppy to humans is a thing of easy beauty; they look like Gund teddy bears. Tula hung from my neck like a cub while I showed her around the neighborhood. Peter and his wife, Pat, came over to meet her the evening after we’d flown home. Peter’s father had been a soldier in the Royal Horse Artillery in the British army, then a jockey and horse trainer, and Peter and his brothers had grown up working with horses and dogs in the stables. We had become friends through his first Belgian, Cleo, and I’d watched him for years with dogs—watched him deal with a skittish or fear-aggressive dog with one gesture. He was an architect by day and a lion tamer by instinct; if I asked him to explain why he’d done something, he often wasn’t even conscious of it. That night he walked into the backyard with a huge smile on his face, sat down on the steps, picked up Tula, and put her inside his T-shirt. A white head popped out under his chin, hesitant but mostly delighted. In an instant he had done several crucial things, all of them with thoughtless affection. Tula now had his scent and his voice; she knew he was strong and in charge and had games to offer. In the months that followed, when she grew to fifty-five pounds and could haul a plow, I would think back on that first meeting with relief: Tula looked at Peter with adoration from that day on.

  Perhaps she knew this was to be a lifetime position: For her first few days at home, Tula was a portrait of angelic calm. She accepted a leash and trotted next to me down the block, sitting quietly on my foot when she encountered anything new. She bunny-hopped through tall grass. She cocked her head at crickets. She talked to her toys, not with a bark but with a woo-woo. “You will love her,” Janice had written, with declarative certainty. How hard could it be?

  And then gradually, persistently, the charm had to make room for the young fiend who lurked within. After a few nights of routine Tula may have deduced that her new surrounds—the grassy backyard, the hovering human, the palace of chew toys—weren’t going anywhere, and I watched as her careful reserve gave way to exuberance at the world around her. She was an exploding bottle of seltzer, most hours of every day. My small urban garden, beneath towering maples, had become an oasis of green in Clementine’s last years; when I brought Tula home, at the end of summer, the yard was lined with stone pots of geraniums and tuberous begonias and border perennials. Two weeks later every flower on the property had been de-headed. Happy and animated by the sight of me, Tula hurled herself into me from any direction; I started calling her Sanorka’s Attack from the Rear.

  When she started teething she preferred me above all her chew toys, and for a month my forearms looked as though they’d been savaged by barracudas. I thought I knew all about teething puppies, and I tried every diversion possible: frozen washcloths, yelping in response, a shake can full of pennies. Tula seemed amused by my efforts. If I tried to pry her jaws off me, she would back up and bark in a wild frenzy. It was like having a baby fox in the kitchen. One night, during my allotted fifteen minutes of calm, when Tula was finally napping in her crate, I sat down at the computer to write Janice. My T-shirt and shorts were shredded; I had scabs up and down my arms. I had been brought down by a creature one-tenth my size. “Tula is really mouthy,” I wrote Janice with bloodless calm. “Do you have any suggestions?”

  “She must be getting her first teeth,” replied my pup’s laconic breeder. “It’s something they all go through. Give her some bones. Easily distractible.” I dried my tears and walked back into battle.

  I was banking on experience to get me through puppyhood, but much of that is academic before a dog reaches a certain age. What I really needed was staying power. Though I had the appetite of a warrior, I lost five pounds the first two weeks Tula was home; I was constantly stepping over baby gates, or carrying her outside, sometimes a dozen times a day. (She gained two pounds a week, which made her my own personal trainer.) After many hours of daily play, when Tula was settled in her crate, she looked at me with forlorn longing. Weren’t there more holes to be dug, more arms and hands to be destroyed? I slept, when I slept, like a cinder block. After a few hours she’d whimper to go out, and I’d breaststroke out of my REM sleep, gather her up, and head outside at 3 or 5 A.M. Some mornings I put her in her crate and pretended to leave the house, then went upstairs to sleep for another couple of hours.

  Errands and exercise became my only retreat. “How are you?” a friend asked me one morning on the dock of the boathouse. “You look exhausted!”

  “I have a new puppy,” I said, and her face lit up. Then I burst into tears. “I miss my old girl,” I said, embarrassed and surprised by my display.

  “Oh, but she’s really young,” said my rower friend, who had Portuguese water dogs and remembered. “She’s still a baby!”

  I was so sleep-deprived that I felt like an exposed nerve. I kept reminding myself that this was the fate of new motherhood, and that my body and energy levels were a couple of decades past that biological capability. One afternoon at the health club I went to sleep standing in the public shower a few yards from the pool, a semi-enclosed area where swimmers rinse off before and after swimming. I’d leaned against the wall and closed my eyes for a minute, and when I opened them again I realized I had stripped to the waist.

  No doubt I half-dreamed that I was already in the locker room. I have no idea who had come and gone during my vertical nap, or how long it lasted. Struggling back into my wet suit, I imagined my response to a perplexed manager, alerted that there was a female flasher in the pool. “So sorry,” I’d have to say. “New puppy. Won’t happen again.”

  The rough moments were interspersed with awe while each little developmental miracle gave way to another. From the first days, when she responded to my recall whistle with only one repetition, I had recognized that Tula was smart and connected to the world around her, and I sensed there was a wonderful adult dog in my future. More immediately soothing was the sweet delight amid the frustration and fatigue: I’d see her chasing her shadow, or she’d go to sleep with her head on my shoulder, and I would melt in utter contentment. One morning the wind blew open a backyard door to the garage, and when I looked outside—I had left Tula alone for all of two minutes—she had gone in and selected three items: a swim buoy, a basket, and a push broom. She lined up the buoy and the basket, grabbed the broom handle in her teeth, and began pushing the items around in a circle like a tiny pony on an axle. It was an exclamation point of joy.

  I have a note that I wrote to myself during those first few weeks of torment and happiness, in what seemed like an endless sea of physical and psychic demands. “I was worried I wouldn’t love her,” I wrote to myself, sometime in September, “and I love her so much I can’t stand it. She is my little dancer a
nd she is the candle in the cave.”

  8.

  There’s a note on my study wall, scribbled to myself one day and stuck there with a piece of tape. The note reads IT’S THE LIONESS, STUPID.

  I kept this instruction for several reasons, the most obvious being to bring me back to the gist of my labors—raising my antelope calf, trying to find the reach from aloneness to connection. The note reminds me that the story is always about sacrifice, about Sisyphean effort, about failure and endurance and loving something more than and beyond yourself. Otherwise there would be no story at all.

  The note reminds me, too, of my mother, whose sacrifices started long before those two hours on the living room floor with me each day. The oldest of six kids on a struggling Texas farm, she struck out for Abilene, a hundred miles away, when she was eighteen. It was the height of the Depression, and within a few years she had made it to Amarillo and put herself through business college, and was sending money home to her mother every month. By the end of the 1930s she owned her own car and a fur coat, and had enough bookkeeping and shorthand skills to be employable for the rest of her life.

  I have a photograph of her taken from those years, around the time she met my dad. She is not yet thirty—a small, gorgeous brunette leaning on a telephone pole, her arms clasped coquettishly behind her. Her standing up against all that Texas Panhandle emptiness is enough to take my breath away.

  For all the ordinary sorrows and failures of our struggling middle-class family, I think I always knew how much my parents loved each other. I had glimpsed the codes: an occasional locked bedroom door, a glance between them, the letters from my dad during the Second World War, which I found in the attic and surreptitiously read. I asked my mother politely one day—I was in my thirties, she past seventy—at what age people stopped making love. “I’ll let you know,” she said, and her eyes shined when she said it.

  Maybe somewhere we know we are animals, with our musk and pheromones sending out mating calls to the nearby chosen. When my sister and I were young girls, my mother dressed up on special occasions to go out with my father. She usually wore the same black-chiffon-and-gold-lamé short evening dress, and she smelled like heaven. Pam and I would watch while she sat at her vanity doing her makeup, and sometimes she would get up and dance a few steps of the jitterbug or the Charleston or fox-trot to delight us. At the end of this grooming ritual, she dabbed perfume behind her ears, and then she and my dad disappeared into the night.

  The perfume told me things I was otherwise too young to understand: that there was some milky language between beings, between my mom and dad, that was private and swoony. After I hit adolescence, I, too, loved perfume—Jungle Gardenia and Shalimar and all the heavy-sexy scents of Yardley Girl youth. The brands themselves were a tip-off: Tabu was gross; Prince Matchabelli was trashy. Patchouli oil soon became the über-aroma for wild girls from Austin to Berkeley, but then, in those early rock-’n’-roll days in Amarillo, the scent you wore told the rest of the tribe precisely who you were.

  My mother’s scent belonged to her alone. I can name every perfume it wasn’t—Chanel, Joy, Estée Lauder. But I cannot locate what it was in my olfactory memory. Surely it would be a letdown, all that mystery confined to a brand name. It was the finishing touch of female perfection, dignified and off-limits, as enveloping as my father’s love.

  She never seemed to mind that I hadn’t married. All those years of my riotous youth, she prayed that I would straighten up and fly right, in my father’s words, and make a life that wouldn’t disgrace the family. By the end of my twenties, after I had gone back to graduate school, she began to exhale a little. Then I moved to the Northeast in 1981, and the world that seemed so exotic to me became a thrilling place she loved to hear about and visit: trains to Manhattan, bigcity newsrooms, the beaches of Cape Cod. Eventually, she came to feel that I had triumphed—first by becoming a writer, then by surviving my own demons.

  My drinking, long an unspoken concern, went from two-fisted to frightening after I left Texas. Of this I told nothing to my mother. The narrative had split now: In her version, I was a freelance writer living in Boston, a “career girl,” as she liked to say, independent and free. In the other story, the more complete one, I was consuming tumblers of Scotch or bourbon every night and writing in spite of this attachment. Then one terrible winter in 1984 I couldn’t keep the half-truths separate anymore. I fell in a blackout and broke four ribs. I was thirty-three, and I look back now at that frightened young woman and see who my mother must have seen—someone who needed help and protection but couldn’t accept either one. I spent another six months coming to terms with what sort of trouble I was in, then stopped drinking in July. And even though I went to hundreds of AA meetings and was a wreck for many months, I didn’t tell my mother any of it until I thought I could bear the conversation.

  For more than a decade I had made her crazy with worry, when I was hitchhiking cross-country or protesting the war and wearing my defiance like a shield. But now that I was sober, I knew that my drinking had been as dangerous as the other risks I had taken. Alcohol and depression had claimed victims on both sides of my family, and probably because I was so scared myself, I didn’t want my mother to know how bad it was at the end: an attic apartment full of whisky bottles and despair and scribbled notes I wrote to myself during blackouts.

  I told her a softer account when I went home to Amarillo that Christmas, six months after I had stopped drinking. She was quiet when I told her, and we didn’t talk much about it for the rest of the trip. About two months later she called me in Boston for our weekly conversation, and said she had something to tell me: that she, a social drinker for years, had stopped drinking soon after I left and hadn’t taken a drink since. I can still hear her explaining why. “I figured if my daughter could do something that she said was the hardest thing she’d ever done in her life,” she told me, “then I could do it with her.”

  The kindness of this act stops me now, nearly three decades later, with the purity of its intent. My mother lived a day’s plane ride away, and her giving up alcohol would have no discernible consequence in my life. I know now that she was doing it not just for the support it engendered but for the intimacy it foretold: Whatever hell I had been through and was still struggling with, she wanted to get in there with me. Down on the floor again: Here, honey, I’ll do them with you.

  She went to a couple of Cambridge AA meetings with me over the next few years. “My name is Ruby,” she invariably said, “and I’m visiting from out of town.”

  “Hi, Ruby!”

  She was eighty-three the last time she came, wearing a hot-pink tracksuit, and I watched her charm everyone in the room. We drove to Provincetown the next day, and while we were shopping she bonded greatly with a gay storekeeper; he mistook my mother for my older girlfriend, and kept referring to her as my companion. I knew she would be flattered by this error and so told her when we left the store. For weeks after she returned to Bible Belt Texas, she signed every letter she wrote to me, “Your companion.”

  When I had been sober about five years, I fell in love with a man my mother might have imagined in a fairy-tale ending: He was soft-spoken and brilliant, a decade older, with an Ivy League pedigree to go along with his accomplishments and charm. Because she was a farmer’s daughter who had gauged progress as the distance between Abilene and Amarillo, I privately feared that she would be too easily dazzled by this romance. The real story was less glamorous and more conflicted. I had fallen hard for a man with a tangled past and outsized ego, and even though I had stopped drinking and was in the middle of building a good life on my own, I lost my footing with him.

  I was mind-numbingly attached to him, so that his disappearance was the one thing I could not tolerate, and he wielded this weapon with strategic acumen. Most of our two-year romance was a narrative out of O’Neill that holds allure, I think, only up to a certain age. Our passions were dramatic and insane: He hung up on me long distance, for no reason and with no
warning; he broke a dinner date on my birthday at 6 P.M. We declared undying love for each other and a week later decided we needed a sabbatical—we split up the weeks for a summer rental we had taken in Wellfleet, and when I came home from work that night, he had moved all his clothes out of my apartment. By the end of three weeks of radio silence, I had lost seven pounds and was sitting on my upstairs porch in the middle of the night, smoking Winstons and staring into space.

  More than two decades later, I am in my office overlooking the tree-lined street where I’ve lived—with dogs, no humans—for eleven years. A house of my own, a room somewhere with an enormous chair. Was I ever that young woman, wild-eyed with want, skinny and strung out and with my heart on a sacrificial slab? Of course I was: The picture is a cliché of female desperation. Maybe love always contains this potential toxin, unleashed when power eclipses self-regard. But I could claim neither one, not then on the porch at 3 A.M., and not when my mother called every few days to check in. For her sake I put a good face on it, and told her I was OK and not to worry. One day she interrupted me and said abruptly, “Honey, don’t take a drink over this man. No man on earth is worth your picking up a drink.”

  My heart exhales when I remember her voice saying those words—that piercing message, delivered like an arrow to the unconscious. I hadn’t known I was close to a drink, but she did, and she knew it would be the worst thing and that she might be able to stop it. And she did—she stopped my free fall. The ledge of my mother, as I dropped through space. I hung up the phone that day and went to my first Al-Anon meeting, a great way station for emotional entanglements, and by the time Henry Higgins came back from his sabbatical I had taken hold of the ground again.

  A few months later Ruby came to visit. The psycho-love was still going on, though within the year it would die a comet’s death, and I would be more relieved than anguished. But that summer I was still wanting things to work out, still wanting everything to be better and different, and we had planned a dinner for Mom to meet S. She had brought the finest thing in her closet for the occasion, a beautiful Chanel suit that my sister had given her. By early afternoon the day of the dinner, S. still hadn’t checked in. I hadn’t talked to him in two days and was trying to hide my panic. (He had a history of fleeing crucial moments.) Ruby and I were standing at my closet, looking over her clothes and mine, and I sighed and said, as calmly as possible, “I hope tonight works out.”