Fifty Acres and a Poodle

by Jeanne Marie Laskas

  Tim, our FedEx guy, is another person who has taken to Marley. In the city, you never know what FedEx man or woman will show up, but here it’s always Tim. What a sight it is to see him come moseying up Wilson Road in his rectangular white truck. It’s like civilization coming. It makes my heart leap, sort of like I imagine it would be for a person lost at sea finally seeing land. Marley and Betty bark like crazy at the arrival of that truck. Well, Tim brings dog treats. He usually lingers with us for a while. Mostly he talks about cars. What car he wants to buy, what car he used to have, his favorite cars. And as he talks about cars, he sits on the back bumper of his truck, stroking Marley. “This is the first poodle I’ve ever known,” he’ll say, smiling curiously at Marley.

  It’s a good thing Betty is not the jealous type, because Marley sure gets all the attention around here.

  These small events leave me feeling happy. I seem to have acquired a whole new talent for feeling happy, or maybe I’ve rediscovered an old one. The tiniest things delight me. Like this ladybug. Can you believe this ladybug is still here? You have to admit this is a long time to have a bug in your life. It moves between the sink and the spider plant and a porcelain frog next to the sink that I have for putting sponges in.

  In my new bug book, I found out that this ladybug is a Multicolored Asian Ladybird Beetle, Harmonia axyridis, and that it can live up to three years. It’s supposed to hibernate in the winter, though. So I don’t know why this one is so peppy. In the cool weather, it’s supposed to find a dark crevice to sleep in and then emit an “aggregating pheromone,” a chemical attracting other ladybugs. This is another thing my ladybug apparently hasn’t done, since it is still very much alone.

  Sometimes I think about emitting an aggregating pheromone. Sometimes I think about what it would be like if I could turn this farm into a neighborhood—I’ll bet all of South Side could fit in these fifty acres—with friends close by and neighbors making neighbor noise, reminding you that you are part of a larger whole. But mostly I project these longings onto the ladybug, which seems, at least for now, to be living out my loneliness for me.

  The other bug I really like reading about in my bug book is the seventeen-year cicada, Magicicada septendecim, which has the longest life span of any bug. Now there’s a bug. It lives underground, sucking on tree roots—for seventeen years. Then, as if magically, it somehow knows that its seventeen years are up. It crawls out of the ground, anchors on a tree, molts, flies around in a swarm of its pals, makes the most awful racket, finds a mate, mates, dies. According to my book, I’ll be forty years old when the Magicicada septendecim appears here the next time. I can’t help but wonder what it’s doing now, underground. I can’t help but wonder who or what tells it that it has reached its seventeenth birthday and that it’s time to go, time to flee, time to start an entirely new adventure.

  These are the kinds of things I wonder in the daytime, as I sit here reading bug books, working on my stories, petting Bob on that spot on his spine he likes, and plunging ever so timidly into solitude.

  My evenings are with Alex. He’ll come home, and we’ll eat dinner and talk about our days. Here at “home.” Is that really what this place has become? Yes, I believe it has. It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment at which I began to think of it as such. Home doesn’t happen that way. Home, I think, is a yanking you feel, a push and pull away from your previous home, a gradual drift. I don’t know that you ever necessarily completely leave your old home, or if you even can. You bring a piece of it with you, if only in your heart, your dreams, or some other combination that makes up memory. I am always surprised to note that every time I have a dream set in a place that is supposed to be “home,” it actually takes place at 810 Lorraine Drive, the suburban house that I grew up in. In the dream I may be thirty-eight years old, but I am in that house.

  I wonder if the South Side house will ever replace Lorraine Drive in my dreams. I sort of doubt it. But South Side will always be a part of me, so much so that I still cannot even imagine selling that house; I am finding all kinds of ways to rationalize keeping it. Lately, Alex and I have been talking about his moving his office there. That little red brick house would make a great place for people to come and dump their misery. That house would understand. That house would never judge, laugh, or betray secrets. I think of that house as a cradle that kept me safe for a decade, and now I don’t mind lending it out.

  Alex and I have been so busy planning. Planning, planning, planning. No, not wedding planning. We’ll get to that. I don’t actually know quite what to do about that W-thing, and I do sort of wish the babes would stop nagging me about it. “I am not the bride type!” I remind them. I didn’t grow up with dreams of marching down an aisle in a big flowing gown and a droopy veil; as far as I know, I have no inner princess that I long to get in touch with. Or if I do, it is stupid.

  But Alex and I are planning. We talk sheep versus goats versus cows. We talk about the pond. It could be a much bigger pond, a five-acre pond instead of a one-acre pond, if we had Billy come in here with even more of his excavation equipment and build the dam up. We talk about building a greenhouse. We talk about how we’re going to renovate the house. We talk about getting a horse. Alex says he wants a mule. A mule? Why does he want a mule? He has no idea. Maybe he just likes the sound of the word mule. We are like two excited travelers landing in some foreign place, planning our itinerary, overdoing it.

  And if there is a nagging in me at all—a vague, almost superstitious sense that this dream is way too good to be true—I am blaming it on spring. Where in the hell is spring? Shouldn’t it be here by now? I don’t know; maybe I’m used to the mall. At the mall, April is ushered in with colorful new displays in pink and purple and lime green. Out here in the country, the colors seem to wait a lot longer.

  We are enveloped in brown. A brown foreground and a slightly lighter tan background and a deep chocolate horizon. Brown. One thing I’ve discovered about the brown is that, close up, the brown is … mud. I’ve never known such mud. Mud that will suck your boot right off. I understand shoelaces in a whole new way. I even have a much more sympathetic view of concrete. When I go to the city, every other week or so to visit the babes, I like to slap my feet on it. “What a great invention!” I’ll say. “Look at that. You can put your foot down and pick it up again, and you still have your shoe on!”

  Bleeep, bleeep. Okay, there’s the phone. Line One all the way back in the big room. I go charging, and so do Marley and Betty. We have a conditioned response to Line One, my office line. Bleeep, bleeep.

  “Hello?”

  It’s Alex. “So what’s for dinner tonight, honey?” he says, with only a hint of irony. Suddenly we’ve been behaving like Samantha and Darren on Bewitched, only without the twitching nose part. A smiling husband going to work, coming home to a smiling wife and a pot roast.

  I’m on dinner duty. Of course I’m on dinner duty; I’m home all day. Well, I’m working the same hours he’s working, but I’m home doing it. And I am soon to be “the wife.” I don’t mind the idea of “wife.” Something about having a full-time man in my life has opened up a domestic side of me I have never before met. I’ve never been one to make a meal, unless it was a very special occasion in which I had to actually open a jar of spaghetti sauce and actually dump some pasta in a pot of boiling water.

  When you are a single person living in the city, you are a restaurant person. You meet your friends for a drink after work and order the low-fat nachos. Or you get take-out Chinese.

  And now look at me. Now I’m thinking pork chops. And homemade applesauce. And sauerkraut. That’s what we’re having tonight. I find that I like cooking. The country makes me appreciate the kitchen. Because the country, or at least this farm, is a place of such vast chaos, and the kitchen is a place I can comprehend.

  I tell Alex about the pork chops and the applesauce and the sauerkraut.

  “That sounds good,” he says. “Listen, can you come into town next Friday with me?”


  “What for?”

  “My doctor wants me to get a test,” he says. “And she says I won’t be able to drive.”

  “What?”

  “Well, you know I went in to her today,” he says.

  “I thought it was just a checkup.”

  “Well, it was,” he says. “But she found something.”

  “What!”

  “I’m sure it’s nothing,” he says.

  “But you just said it was something,” I say. “What is it? Where is it?”

  “Please don’t panic,” he says. “Really. She said it’s probably nothing.”

  He tells me it’s some bleeding, something in his intestine.

  “What?”

  “I’m sure it’s nothing,” he says. “She just wants to rule everything out. I swear to you she said it’s probably nothing.”

  “All right,” I say. “If you say so. But I don’t like the sound—”

  “Next Friday,” he says. “We have to be there at, like, seven A.M. or something.”

  “Well, it’s a date,” I say.

  He says he’s got to go. He’s busy. Another client is about to pop through his door with another hour’s worth of misery.

  I go back to the kitchen and finish the dishes. Bob is here, rubbing against my legs, weaving himself in and out and between.

  Nothing, Bob. He said it was nothing. So then why does he need me to go with him if it’s nothing? I’m not liking the sound of that. “Nothing.” But okay. I’m not going to stand here and get worked up over nothing. Bob seems to agree. Well, he is not challenging me on the notion. He is purring so loud, I can feel it in my ankles.

  I look at the ladybug. The French call ladybugs “les bêtes du bon Dieu,” creatures of the good God. In Italy they’re called “vacchette della Madonna,” cows of the Virgin. In most every culture where ladybugs are found, people regard them as symbols of good luck.

  La bête du bon Dieu. A good God. A God who has placed me gently in this place. Well, maybe not gently, but affirmatively. I look beyond the ladybug, out the window. Beyond the window, I see Billy and Tom and the bulldozer. Beyond them, woods and sky and the vast brown unknown. And beyond that: spring. That’s one thing you can count on. You can never know what’s next in your life, but you can know that spring comes after winter. You can trust, even though it looks impossible right now, that the green and the pink and the purple will come. You can trust the rhythm of the seasons.

  Are there other seasons, other rhythms? Colors and sounds we can’t see or hear? There must be. There must be hundreds of them going on all at once. I think of the mysterious seventeen-year seasons of the cicadas. I think of drought and flood, of fire and wind, of tornadoes and meteor showers, all kinds of rhythms playing some syncopated beat we can’t hear, much less understand. A rhythm heard only by angels, perhaps, only by seventeen-year cicadas, only by souls over centuries, for all we know.

  I think how you can feel cozy and snug and in love and like the happiest person alive, with your very own good luck ladybug to seal the deal, but you can never know what’s next.

  Now Billy and Tom are running down the hill. Well, that’s weird. It’s not even two o’clock yet; are they finished for the day? Why are they running? Why are they running so funny? It’s an awkward jog. Tom is holding his father’s arm, holding it with the kind of urgency you hold injuries. Oh, God. Has something happened? They see me looking out the window, and Tom motions for me to come outside, to hurry.

  I grab the cordless phone, Line Three, because I think: Oh God, I better dial 911. Does 911 even work out here? I think, by the strange way they are running and holding Billy’s arm, that perhaps Billy’s arm has been amputated. Or half-amputated. I can’t see it from the elbow down. I don’t know what else to think.

  Betty and Marley run outside with me. Roo roo roo roo! Woof, woof, woof.

  “Here!” Tom is yelling. “Here!”

  I am sprinting toward them as fast as I can in this mud. I am out here with my slippers on, as you do in times of emergency. As Billy and Tom come into closer range, I can see that Tom is not holding Billy’s amputated arm at all. He is holding … an animal.

  “A possum!” Tom says, as they come closer.

  Oh.

  “Tom caught it by the tail,” Billy says, smiling. “We thought you might want to see it.”

  Oh.

  Billy is holding the animal by the back of the head, and he is squeezing around its jaws tight, to prevent it from biting. The animal is licking its tongue back and forth, for lack of any other flailing possibilities. Tom has the animal by the hips. It’s not a very attractive animal. It has a very thick, scaly tail.

  Roo roo roo roo! Woof, woof, woof.

  “Betty, get down!” I shout. “Marley, sit!”

  “You want to touch it?” Tom asks. He’s got his blue coveralls zipped down to his belt, and an undershirt showing.

  “Um,” I say. “Actually, no.”

  “The fur is really soft,” Billy says.

  “And she’s pregnant!” Tom says. “Did you know her babies will fit into a teaspoon, that’s how small they are?”

  “Is that right?” I say, standing here in the mud, in my slippers, holding a phone, wondering why we’re doing this.

  “Possums have a pouch, like kangaroos,” Billy says.

  “Is that right?”

  Billy and Tom spend a good long while giving me possum facts. This seems to be some sort of educational bonus, an extra service thrown in with their bulldozing work. They tell me about some of the other animals they’ve seen while scraping the multiflora. They tell me about a tiny doe and its mother. They tell me about countless pheasants and turkeys and a beaver. They tell me about “millions and millions” of groundhogs.

  “Is that right?” I say.

  No, the irony is not lost on me. In fact, I’ve kind of been avoiding this issue. I’ve been sitting here all these weeks watching this multiflora get scraped away, cheering the vast nothingness left behind—and I have done nothing about the fact that I am responsible for the destruction of perhaps hundreds of little birdie homes and rabbit warrens and Bambi bungalows and, now I see, possum maternity wards. In the hierarchy of ecological awareness, Little Miss No Hunting is no higher than the hunters. They kill a deer or two. I order the displacement of entire villages.

  “We should get the possum away from the dogs,” I say, feeling pity for the rodent. Or the marsupial. Or whatever. Betty and Marley are enthralled by the sight—or smell—of this thing, sitting here at Tom’s feet, as if waiting for him to release dinner.

  “Yeah, this thing would kill a dog if the dog didn’t know what it was doing,” Tom says. “See those teeth?” The possum is now drooling.

  “Well, I don’t think Betty or Marley would know how to battle a possum, so—”

  “All right, Tom, go put her in the briars down there,” Billy says.

  Billy hands the jaw to Tom to hold, which he does with one strong hand, with the other balancing the animal’s rump. He waddles over to a ravine and bends down, releasing the animal gently, respectfully.

  “What time is it?” he says, returning.

  “About two,” I say.

  “I gotta go,” he says to his dad. “I’m going to be late. I have to go home and get cleaned up first.”

  “Then you go on,” Billy says.

  Today is the day for Tom to go to the army recruiting station. Both his father and grandfather have done their duty to their country, and Tom hopes to follow in the tradition.

  “Well, good luck,” I say to him. He smiles and gives a salute.

  “You want to put some boots on?” Billy says to me, looking down at my fluffy yellow slippers, now covered with mud. “And I’ll show you what we did.”

  “Sure,” I say, and head back to the house to get outfitted for another mud-walk.

  When I return, Billy is leaning on the fence, pinching some tobacco out of a little round container. He tucks it in his lip, then put
s the container in his back pocket.

  “You warm enough in that?” he says, looking at me.

  “Yeah,” I say, opting not to explain that this jacket is made of a special insulating fabric that the Lands’ End company has promised will keep me warm in subzero temperatures.

  “Well, we’re almost done for this year,” Billy says to me as we walk. Now that mud season is here, he says, he’s going to have to quit pushing briars because that bulldozer could slide sideways down that hill and kill him. So he’ll give it another week or two, but that’s it until next year.

  I hate hearing this.

  I want to believe he feels disappointed, too.

  I mean, I know it’s stupid. Clinging to a bulldozer driver for company. But I’ve come to think of Billy and Tom as part of this place I now so casually call home.

  Billy and I continue walking, kicking mud balls as we go. The sky is a shock of blue, and there are no clouds. I take a deep breath, as if hoping to catch a whiff of spring. Well, that’s stupid, because I get a noseful of burning rubber and diesel smoke. I choke, cough, collect myself, waving my hand in front of my face as if to get air.

  “You okay there?” Billy says.

  “I’m fine,” I say. “I’m tough.”

  “Yeah.”

  We walk in silence.

  “Well, I hope Alex don’t mind,” Billy says.

  Mind?

  “You being his woman and all,” he says. “I hope he don’t mind the way we’re alone like this every day. If you’d like, I could explain to him.”

  We are alone?

  Well, yes, we are alone, just me and Billy and God knows how many pregnant possums out here. But I never thought of it that way.

  “I don’t think Alex will mind,” I say to Billy.

  “I just thought I should say something,” he says. “You being his woman and all.”