by Jim Kraus
I submitted my resignation a few months after the wedding.
And no, I had not become “with child”—although that would have been more easily accepted and understood as a reason for my departure.
As I think about how we fell in love, which warmed my heart, I also considered the question of why we fell in love. People have asked that of me on occasion, and I do not think I provided a good answer.
But here’s an attempt at the truth of why it all happened.
I have no idea—save for a best guess. I could make him laugh, and vice versa. He’s always funny . . . was always funny and always game for any adventure. I thought things out more, and acted a bit more analytical, so I guess we balanced out. He said I was pretty. He never said beautiful—except on our wedding day—and other than that day, I wouldn’t have believed him if he had said “beautiful.” He always said “pretty.” And he said it in a wistful, yearning manner, as if he really and truly meant it. He said that he had dated a lot of women, but there was something lacking at their core—the beautiful ones he’d dated, that is. He once said that some really attractive women know, deep down where they hide their own painful truths, that their beauty is always in the process of fading. Of course, beautiful young women sometimes turn into beautiful old women—but for someone who has savored the wine at the acme of its taste, any reduction in clarity and power will be viewed as a slippage, a step into the abyss of looking merely nice, or sort of attractive. It was a slide that some of them did not want to endure; their fight against it made them brittle and hard at the same time.
Me, on the other hand—well, I was a ray of warm sunshine by comparison. I knew that I had not started at the mountaintop, so my personal slide into being a little less pretty was far less steep and nowhere near as frightening.
He didn’t phrase it so crassly or harshly, but that is what he meant.
And that was enough.
We did make each other laugh.
And we both believed in God.
He did up to the end.
Me? Now I am not so sure.
This is where the good dog Rufus makes his entrance onto the main stage of my life—the play in motion was the tragedy of my most recent years. I get maudlin at times, and wallowing in self-pity seems to be my second-favorite form of exercise.
Rufus, now in his second year, is full grown, and as large as he will ever get, plus or minus a pound or two and an inch or two.
Even though the breeder said that as an adult, he would be smallish, she had been mistaken. The runt grew up to be a big dog, by miniature standards. We run into another schnauzer during our evening walks—a distant cousin of Rufus, actually, due to the fact that they came from the same breeder. I haven’t looked at his papers to see if they actually are related, but they do look alike. Go figure—they are both schnauzers. The other dog is exactly the same as Rufus except for Rufus’s size. He is a big miniature schnauzer. Taller than his cousin by several inches and a good half-dozen pounds heavier. I don’t mind at all; it simply means that he will never be a show dog. And he couldn’t be, actually, since he was “fixed” a few weeks after I got him, and such dogs aren’t allowed to participate in dog shows.
I don’t know why.
Well, actually I do know why, now that I’ve looked it up, but it still doesn’t make sense to me.
4
I snapped on the leash to Rufus’s collar and we headed outside. The air had grown cutting and brittle, a hint of winter to come, and any wind, at night, found its way through the weak defenses of my coat and hat and scarf and gloves. The complaint from the dog during winter months came from walking in newly fallen snow, the wet kind of thick snow, like chilled oatmeal. It would ball up between his toes. The snow balled up and he would stop every so often to try and chew it out. Or look at me with a supplicant’s face and silently request my help. He was small last winter, and we only caught the tail end of winter, and we did not travel as far during our walks. Winter had never been my favorite season. It was to be Rufus’s second.
The moon slipped up over the horizon, and the winter moon seemed whiter, more ashen, than normal, the pale light at the bare tree limbs, spiking shadows along our path.
Rufus stopped to investigate a particularly interesting bush. Sometimes, I let him have free rein on the time we’re out; other walks, when I am either cold or impatient, I will snick at the leash to get the small beast moving again.
This night I waited.
I pulled a dog snack out of my coat’s breast pocket. I buy them in bulk at the local pet store. They look like Styrofoam, in yellow and brown and tan, supposedly representing the flavors of chicken, beef, and peanut butter. Rufus loves them. He considers them almost as desirable as table scraps.
Almost.
I took one and broke it in half, the snap of the snack crackling loud in the cold air.
Our vet said he might be a pound or two heavy for his size, “but nothing to worry about. He’s in good health.”
I slipped the half-snack back into my pocket and bent down and gave Rufus the other half. He accepted it with gratitude and chewed as noisily as he could.
We both began to walk again. A dozen paces later, Rufus stopped. He did not look at me directly, nor did I look at him. He stops all the time during our walks.
“Why do you break my crunchy in half?”
I heard the voice, his voice, Rufus’s voice, as clearly as I have heard anything in my life—maybe clearer than most.
Have you ever seen any of the Walt Disney animated Winnie the Pooh cartoons? Do you remember Eeyore, the sad-faced donkey with a tacked-on tail? Do you remember his voice? A very slow, deliberate, bass voice—not stupid by any means—but as if his words were being very carefully chosen and formed in his mouth, like chewing a large amount of gummy food. The voice, not stupid, just slow, as if each word had to be slowly measured out and scrupulously selected to be the most correct.
That’s what Rufus sounded like.
Wait.
That’s Rufus I am talking about.
And Rufus is a dog.
Bewildered isn’t the right word for how I felt. Frightened isn’t the right word, either. Nonplussed, maybe. I don’t know. I never trust anyone who claims that they don’t have the right words to describe something. We think in words—right? Use them. But tonight . . . tonight, I really did not have any words to use, no words that could properly describe what I was thinking.
The conversation, such as it was, simply felt . . . normal. Just everyday normal. Sorry, but I did not have a thesaurus handy.
So normal that I remained standing—rational and standing—and slowly formed a reply.
“I . . . I don’t want you to get fat,” I said, as I would to a friend whom I tried to convince from taking a third piece of pie at an all-you-can-eat buffet after breaking up with her cad of a boyfriend.
At that specific moment, his question and my answer seemed altogether, totally normal. I think I already said that . . . but it all felt . . . normal.
Rufus sort of nodded, as if digesting the information, and began to walk again, only to stop a few paces later. He turned his head ever so slightly toward me like he might be dreading the next question.
“Am I fat?”
What do you do when your dog asks you a perfectly linear, logical question?
In the cold dark of a winter night.
You answer him.
“No. You’re not fat. Dr. Barbara, you know, your vet . . .”
Rufus nodded.
“She said that you could lose a pound or two. No big deal, she said. So . . . I thought I would cut back on these treats. Just a little.”
Rufus waited a heartbeat or two and then continued on our walk.
“Okay,” he said as we turned the corner on Glencoe and headed for home.
Several hours later, in bed, well after midnight, I sat bolt upright, wide awake.
It was 2:15 a.m.—exactly the time I received that phone call three years earlier.
The phone call that shattered everything.
Sometimes the night terrors would overcome me.
But this was no night terror.
I had awoken from a hallucinogenic dream—where up was down and light was dark and dogs could talk.
Rufus lay at the corner of the bed. He slept there, not always, but when he did, he positioned himself at the corner, on a diagonal, so he could see the window and the bedroom door at the same time. His guarding instincts were deep in his being.
He must have heard me sit upright, or felt the movement. I snapped on my light.
He blinked, his eyes trying to adjust to the brightness.
“Did you really talk to me, Rufus? Or am I just widow-lady-crazy, with a horribly overwrought imagination?”
He did not speak, but I saw his eyes. The dark color seemed to deepen in understanding. He lowered his head, then looked back up, as if sheepish about not responding.
He nodded. At least I am pretty sure that he nodded.
Then he lay his head back down on the comforter and closed his eyes.
I took a series of deep, cleansing breaths, learned from the three yoga lessons I took at the YMCA until I dropped out because I couldn’t stand the soft-talking instructor.
My dog talks to me.
Is that my life now?
It is and was.
Go figure.
The moment Ava touched my doorbell, Rufus both fell and jumped off the sofa in the sunroom, his claws scrabbling for purchase on the polished hardwood floors, his back legs looking like a cartoon, where the animated animal in question spins its legs in a furious circle for a moment until it finds traction. Rufus was like that, at least on the hardwood. On rugs, he took off like a shot, right away.
And the doorbell was the only device I had found that drove him completely insane. I suspect the guarding instincts, buried under hundreds of generations of domesticity and civility, were not so buried after all. Rufus slid through the kitchen, like a stock car on a clay track, his rear legs pumping furiously, barking with every step, barking louder and more frantically as he drew near to the front door, the pitch of his barking escalating with each step, until it sounded like he was nearing an explosion from a paroxysm of the squealy-bark-squealies.
But as soon as I opened the door and deemed the visitor welcome, Rufus would revert, like an iconic Jekyll and Hyde, into a tail and hindquarters wagging machine, with yips of joy and lots of happy whimpers and squirms, reveling in welcoming whoever had come calling. So far, we had never encountered a person I did not want to be there. Some people, Rufus liked more than others. But with Ava—well—he really liked Ava. As soon as she took a chair in the kitchen, Rufus attempted to climb onto her lap. He almost made it, and she grabbed at him to pull him up, only to have him yelp like he was in excruciating pain. A small spot at the end of his rib cage elicited this sort of response.
The vet—our vet, I suppose—Dr. Barb, had found nothing amiss when I told her about it. She had poked and prodded a bit.
“My best guess is that he just doesn’t like being touched there,” she had said. Now, when I pick him up, I try to avoid the area.
Ava recoiled as if she had caused permanent damage, and nearly dropped Rufus to the floor. But he clawed his way back onto her lap and, with a raised paw, demanded that she pet him.
She obliged, of course, and scratched and petted him for the better part of twenty minutes, until I made coffee and brought out cookies. Rufus could not beg from her lap, so he took his standard position at the foot of the chair, staring at me, then Ava, wondering who would first give in to his plaintive staring.
I usually was the one to weaken, but today, Ava snapped off a corner of a tea cookie and slipped it to a grateful Rufus, who did not chew, but swallowed it relatively whole.
“So, life has been good?” Ava asked.
Ava has been a long-time friend, a friend before Jacob came along. She worked with me, at the same company, for a year. She left to return to teaching and got married—and divorced—all before the accident. Her life was neither simple nor turmoil-free. Now we were both single again. Commiserating with her felt good, sort of therapeutic. We both lived at the same level. Lonely. Addicted to sympathy.
“It’s been okay,” I replied.
Ava popped most of a tea cookie into her mouth. “You’re a bad liar.”
She could get away with saying things like that because . . . well . . . she sort of always told the truth. She pushed an errant wisp of brown hair from her face. She had added red highlights to her hair a few weeks earlier, but they came out more purple than red.
“Just like when you lied about my hair. You said it looked ‘striking,’ ” she said, mocking my tone, her self-amusement lighting up her face. She was a pretty woman when she smiled—wide mouth, full lips, with cheekbones that made makeup almost unnecessary.
“It is striking.”
“It’s hideous. Like it had been attacked by a wine-soaked stylist-in-training, after a particularly trying day. Without her glasses. Or a mirror. Or directions. While I lay deep in a coma.”
I laughed, almost spitting out a mouthful of coffee. I didn’t because I would have spilled it over the upholstery that I tell other people to be careful of. She was right. As hair goes, it indeed could be classified as hideous, but in an avant-garde sort of way. I don’t think Ava considered herself avant-garde.
“Well,” I said after composing myself, “the color will fade soon enough.”
I really liked Ava. She made me laugh. We made each other laugh—though I know her job of amusing me was much more difficult than mine.
“I do get second looks from the young hoodlums at the car wash and the 7-Eleven on Main Street.”
“Ava,” I said in my best schoolmarm scolding voice. “You are terrible.”
“No. I mean it. They think I’m an older degenerate—just like they want to be in twenty years. Like flies and honey. I could have been asked to the fall dance at the high school a hundred times, if I had wanted to. Just have to pretend to be more accessible, if you know what I mean. Dress the part more. A little more cleavage.”
Ava acted as a tonic for me. She lived so far from the traditional suburban woman—if there is really such a person. Her almost abrasive, semi-caustic sort of personality could shock people. I guess I liked that quality in her.
“So how are you and Dr. Tom getting along?” I asked. She was three months into a relationship with Dr. Tom Wakley, a twice-divorced podiatrist with a large practice the next town over. He was fit, bald, and drove a Lincoln.
“He’s not a doctor. He’s a podiatrist,” she answered.
“They go to medical school. That makes them doctors.”
She shrugged. “When is the last time you heard of someone dying from toenail fungus?”
I stifled a laugh again, gulping down the last half swallow of coffee.
“I’ll call him a real doctor when my TV has a doctor’s show featuring a staff of podiatrists,” she smirked. “Like that will ever happen.”
Rufus trotted off once our cookies were consumed.
“Me and the podiatrist . . . well, we’re doing okay.” She toyed with her empty cup, tilting it back and forth. “I guess. He’s a nice enough guy. A bit of an ego problem. Not a deal-breaker. Not the best sense of humor, but he can be funny on occasion. You know . . . it’s okay, most of the time. It is nice to have someone to hold hands with . . . if you know what I mean.” She arched her eyebrows, as if unwilling to say out loud what “holding hands” meant. Maybe she didn’t want to shock Rufus.
I did know what she meant, which marked a huge difference between myself and Ava. Some things she did, I could never do. At least, I think I could never do.
She poured herself another cup of coffee.
“I would be having a better time if this were wine.”
“Ava—it’s three in the afternoon.”
“So? Wine is illegal in the afternoon? Not like I’m operating on a bunion later today.�
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I walked to the refrigerator and took out the half-and-half. In all honesty, I had always been relatively addicted to coffee, so multiple cups in the afternoon were pretty much standard operating procedure.
“And how goes it with you, Mary? You’re always asking the questions—and never answering any.”
“I’m a writer. I observe.”
Ava offered a twisted smile.
“You steal truths from other people’s lives, that’s what you do.”
“Do not.”
“Do too,” she countered. “Remember that character in that book of yours—the rebellious Amish farmer who wanted to move to . . . where . . . Montana or someplace?”
“He wanted to learn to ski.”
“Yeah, that’s the one. He was the spitting image—a duplicate—of Ronald Weerset. Remember him?”
We both knew Ron Weerset as a single man from our shared work experience some ten years earlier. I will be kind and say that he could be classified as odd. A socks-with-sandals sort of guy, a gentle spirit I suppose, but given to long-winded explanations of just about everything, and hair that looked as if he cut it himself.
“He was not. Ron was not that handsome.”
“But his characteristics. His mannerisms. They were like twins.”
I hesitated in answering. She was right. I had copied that poor man’s characteristics. And I didn’t offer him a dime in royalties for the usage.
“Okay. I’ll answer a question. Ask away.”
Such an offer did not occur often with me. I seldom had ever volunteered to provide personal information—even to a friend.
I am pretty sure that having Rufus in my life had broken down some of my personal walls, my protective shell, just a little. I was getting used to talking to him during the day. After three years, almost, of silence during the day, for the most part, I now yakked—a lot. Jabbered, actually. Rufus would fall asleep sometimes even in the middle of a particularly impassioned diatribe. However, he never talked back during the day—or had not so far. Instead, I would chatter on and on to him.
And I would never admit this to anyone, not even to Rufus, at least not now, but before Rufus came into my life, I would walk about the house, and talk to the various pictures of Jacob that I still had on display. Some of the pictures—pictures of me with my son—I removed, stored safely in a cardboard box, taped shut, securely taped, labeled IMPORTANT PICTURES.
