A Three Dog Life
Abigail Thomas
* * *
HARCOURT, INC.
Orlando Austin New York San Diego Toronto London
* * *
Copyright © 2006 by Abigail Thomas
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval
system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work
should be mailed to the following address: Permissions Department,
Harcourt, Inc., 6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.
www.HarcourtBooks.com
The author is grateful to the following magazines and anthologies for publishing
pieces from A Three Dog Life: "Accident" and "Home" were published in O.
"Comfort" was published in the anthology Dog Is My Co-Pilot. "The Magnificent
Frigate Bird" and "Filling What's Empty" were published in Tin House. "Learning
to Live Alone" was published in Self. "Dog Talk" and "Carolina's in Heat and I'm
Not" were published in Bark. "How to Banish Melancholy" was published in the
anthology Woman's Best Friend. "Guilt" was published in Subtropics. "Knitting 2002
to Present" was published in Swivel. "The Past, Present, Future" was published in
Real Simple. "Moving" was published on mrbellersneighborhood.com.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A three dog life/Abigail Thomas.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Thomas, Abigail. 2. Authors, American—20th century—Biography.
I. Title.
PS3570.H53Z46 2006
813'.54—dc22 2005033782
ISBN-13: 978-0-15-101211-4 ISBN-10: 0-15-101211-3
Text set in Garamond MT
Designed by Cathy Riggs
Printed in the United States of America
First edition
A C E G I K J H F D B
* * *
For Sally
* * *
Australian Aborigines slept with
their dogs for warmth on cold nights,
the coldest being a "three dog night."
—WIKIPEDIA
* * *
Thank you to Agnes Wilkie and Jill Aguanno
for insight and wisdom and compassion and
for making me laugh;
and thank you Chuck Verrill, best friend,
for getting it, always, whatever it is.
I
What Stays the Same
This is the one thing that stays the same: my husband got hurt. Everything else changes. A grandson needs me and then he doesn't. My children are close then one drifts away. I smoke and don't smoke; I knit ponchos, then hats, shawls, hats again, stop knitting, start up again. The clock ticks, the seasons shift, the night sky rearranges itself, but my husband remains constant, his injuries are permanent. He grounds me. Rich is where I shine. I can count on myself with him.
I live in a cozy house with pretty furniture. Time passes here. There is a fireplace and two acres and the dogs run around and dig big holes and I don't care. I have a twenty-seven-inch TV and lots of movies. The telephone rings often. Rich is lodged in a single moment and it never tips into the next. Last week I lay on his bed in the nursing home and watched him. I was out of his field of vision and I think he forgot I was there. He stood still, then he picked up a newspaper from a neat pile of newspapers, held it a moment, and carefully put it back. His arms dropped to his sides. He looked as if he was waiting for the next thing but there is no next thing.
I got stuck with the past and future. That's my half of this bad hand. I know what happened and I never get used to it. Just when I think I've metabolized everything I am drawn up short. "Rich lost part of his vision" is what I say, but recently Sally told the nurse, "He is blind in his right eye," and I was catapulted out of the safety of the past tense into the now.
Today I drive to the wool store. I arrive with my notebook open and a pen.
"What are you doing?" Paul asks.
"I'm taking a poll," I say. "What is the one thing that stays stable in your life?"
"James," says Paul instantly.
"And I suppose James will say Paul," I say, writing down James.
"No, he'll say the dogs," says Paul, laughing.
"Creativity," says Heidi, the genius.
"I have to think," says a woman I don't know.
" The dogs," says James.
Rich and I had a house together once. He was the real gardener. He raked and dug, planted and weeded, stood over his garden proudly. Decorative grasses were his specialty. He cut down my delphiniums when he planted his fountain grass. "Didn't you see them?" I asked. "They were so tall and beautiful." But he was too busy digging to listen. I lost interest in flowers. We planted a hydrangea tree outside the kitchen window. We cut down (after much deliberation) two big prickly bushes that were growing together like eyebrows at either side of our small path. We waited until the birds were done with their young, then Rich planted two more hydrangea trees where the bushes had stood. I don't want to see how big they are by now, how beautiful their heavy white blossoms look when it rains. "I love what you've done with the garden," my friend Claudette says, looking at the bed of overgrown nettles in my backyard. I weeded there exactly once. I want to plant fountain grass out there, but first I need a backhoe.
Rich and I don't have the normal ups and downs of a marriage. I don't get impatient. He doesn't have to figure out what to do with his retirement. I don't watch him go through holidays with the sorrow of missing his absent children. Last week we were walking down the hall to his room, it was November, we had spent the afternoon together. "If I wasn't with you and we weren't getting food, the dark would envelop my soul," he said cheerfully.
He never knows I'm leaving until I go.
II
Accident
My husband and I met twelve years ago after he answered a personal ad I placed in the New York Review of Books. We met at the Moon Palace restaurant on Broadway and 112th Street. It was raining, he carried a big umbrella. He had beef with scallions and I had sliced sauteed fish. It took me about five minutes to realize this was the nicest man in the world and when he asked me to marry him thirteen days later I said yes. He was fifty-seven, I was forty-six. Why wait? We still have the magazine. I used to look at the page full of ads, mine the only one he'd circled, and feel the fragility of our luck. "Thank you for the happiest year of my life," he wrote on our first anniversary. We envisioned an old age on a front porch somewhere, each other's comfort, companions for life. But life takes twists and turns. There is good luck and bad.
Yesterday in his hospital room my husband asked urgently, "Will you move me twenty-six thousand miles to the left?" "Yes," I said, not moving from my chair. After a moment he said, "Thank you," adding in wonder, "I didn't feel a thing." "You're welcome," I answered. "Are we alone?" he asked. "We are," I answered, the nurse's aide having stepped out for a moment. "What happened to Stacy and the flounder?" he said, and I saw the hospital room as he must experience it, a kind of primordial twilight soup, an atmosphere in which a flounder might well be swimming through midair. The image stays with me.
My husband is having brain surgery next week. Today I am sitting in the dog park. The weather is what Rich would call "a soft day." This is the place I try to make sense of things, order them, to tame what happened. Our beagle, Harry, makes his way around the perimeter of the dog run, with his nose to the ground. He is a loner. I, too, sit by myself, but I
pay attention to everything. "Suffering is the finest teacher," said an old friend long ago. "It teaches you details." I didn't know what he was talking about. I do now. I watch the dogs, one tiny dachshund so skinny he looks like a single stroke of calligraphy. An elderly man with a very young chow reaches down to pat my dog. Harry skips away.
"Very good," answers another man, who has just been asked how he is. It has been a long time since I answered that question that way.
Monday, April 24, at nine forty at night, our doorman Pedro called me on the intercom. "Your dog is in the elevator," he said. The world had just changed forever, and I think I knew it even then. "My dog? Where is my husband?" I asked. "I don't know. But your dog is in the elevator with 14E. You'd better go get him." I stepped into the hall in my bathrobe. The elevator door opened and a neighbor delivered Harry to me. "Where is my husband?" I asked again, but my neighbor didn't know. Harry was trembling. Rich must be frantic, I thought. Then the buzzer rang again. "Your husband has been hit by a car," Pedro said, "113th and Riverside. Hurry."
Impossible, impossible. Where were my shoes? My skirt? I was in slow motion, moving underwater. I looked under the bed, found my left shoe, grabbed a sweater off the back of a chair. This couldn't be serious. I threw my clothes on and got into the elevator. Then I ran along Riverside and when I saw the people on the sidewalk ahead I began to run faster, calling his name. What kind of injury drew such a crowd?
I found my husband lying in a pool of blood, his head split open. Red lights were flashing from cop cars and emergency vehicles and the EMS people were kneeling over his body. "Let them work," said a police officer, as I tried to fight my way next to him, managing to get close enough to touch his hand. They were cutting the clothes off him, his Windbreaker, his flannel shirt. Somebody pulled me away. "Don't look," he said, but I needed to look, I needed to keep my eyes on him. A policeman began asking me questions. "You're his wife? What's his name? Date of birth? What's your name? Address?" Then as I watched they loaded Rich onto a stretcher and into the ambulance. I wanted to climb in too but they sped off without me. A policeman drove me to the emergency room at St. Luke's Hospital, three blocks away. The superintendent of our building, Cranston Scott, came with me, stayed until my family arrived, gave me his credit card number to call my children and my sisters. I called Rich's former wife, who had the numbers of Rich's children, his brother, Gil. I waited in a small room outside the emergency room at the hospital while dozens of hospital personnel went through the door where my husband lay. I found out later that the accident report the police filled out listed Rich as "dead, or likely to die."
Harry wanders over. He looks up at me and I reach down to stroke his head, his ears. He comes to me to reassure himself that I am still there, I think, or perhaps to reassure me that he is still there. He was a stray; we adopted him from a friend into whose yard he had wandered, starved and terrified, a year ago. Rich hadn't wanted a dog. Every time I dragged him to look at yet another puppy I'd discovered in yet another pet store, he would look at it and say something like "Yes, but isn't his face a bit rodentlike?" When I took him to met Harry he said, "Well, that's a very nice little dog." Five months later Harry got off his leash and Rich ran into Riverside Drive to save him. I don't look at Harry and think, If only we hadn't got him. I don't blame myself for this accident, or our dog, although I believe if it had been a child who was hurt I probably would. We were two adults living our lives and this terrible thing happened. I don't find it ironic that the very reason Rich got hurt is the creature who comforts me. There is no irony here, no room for guilt or second-guessing. That would be a diversion, and indulgence. These are hard facts to be faced head-on. We are in this together, my husband and I, we have been thrown into this unfamiliar country with different weather, different rules. Everything I think and do matters now, in a way it never has before.
I seem to be leaving in the road behind me all sorts of unnecessary baggage, stuff too heavy to carry. Old fears are evaporating, the claustrophobia that crippled me for years is gone, vanished. I used to climb the thirteen flights to our apartment because I was terrified of being alone in the elevator. What if it got stuck? What if I never got out? Then there I was one Sunday morning in the hospital, Rich on the eighth floor, the elevator empty. What had for years terrified me now seemed ridiculously easy. I haven't got the time for this, I thought, and got right in. When the doors closed I kept thinking, Go ahead! Try it! What more can you possibly do to me?
The head injury my husband sustains is a traumatic brain injury, specifically damage to the frontal lobes; part of his brain descended into his sinus cavities, dragging arteries along with it. There is a hole or holes in his dura, the casing around the brain; his skull is fractured like a spiderweb. Everywhere. The danger of meningitis is real. They must remove the dead brain tissue, repair the dura, relieve the pressure in the buildup of fluid, repair the damage to his skull. It is a long surgery, and carries with it its own danger of infection. The surgery was scheduled three weeks ago but had to be postponed when Rich developed a fever three days before.
He was fine in the morning, and in a good mood, but by afternoon he felt warm to my touch, and he was unlike himself, unlike any version of himself. He spoke in a low raspy voice like Jimmy Cagney, and I couldn't reel him back from the deep water he seemed to be in. I knew that one of the early signs of meningitis is a personality change and I was scared. The doctors immediately treated him as if this were meningitis, and bags of sinister yellow liquids dripped into his arm. The lumbar puncture came back negative, but the surgery was postponed until his fever went down.
It is June, the weather is warm, and Harry is shedding. When I brush him he stands absolutely still. At night he sleeps in bed with me. I feel his warm breath on my neck, his ear "like a velvet lily pad," as Rich described it, against my cheek. I don't sleep on Rich's side of the bed, Rich's side is Rich's side, his pajamas still neatly tucked under his pillow. When I first saw them, and his trousers over the back of the chair, I wept. When I think about the past I get sad, our mornings of coffee and the newspaper. After his shower he would appear in the kitchen with the bathroom wastebasket in his hands, announcing "the naked dustman." I miss my husband. I miss the comfort of living with this man I loved and trusted absolutely. When I gave a reading in May, I missed his shining face among the others. I missed his pride in me, his impulse to take everyone in the audience out for dinner. Walking down our street I missed him by my side. The past gets swallowed up in the extraordinary circumstances of now. But mostly it hurts too much to let my mind go back.
My son called last night. "Are you worried about the operation?" he asked. "I don't think so," I answered. It is what I have heard one of the surgeons call "meat and potatoes" surgery. What terrifies me is seeing Rich in the recovery room. This doesn't make any sense, but I keep remembering his face just after his accident, ruined beyond recognition, blood pooling in the corners of his swollen eyes. Those first days his daughter, Sally, and I took twelve-hour shifts at the hospital, sitting in a chair next to his bed, listening to the beeping of monitors in the ICU. We were afraid to leave him. It was as if we were trying to hatch an egg, keeping him warm with our presence, and we didn't want him to wake without a familiar face nearby. "¿Qué pasa?" were the first words he spoke when the doctors removed his breathing tube. I put my ear close to his mouth. "¿Quépasa?" This man who failed Spanish. It is a funny miracle.
I am sitting on my bench; behind me three dogs are digging a hole to China. The odd woman who wears a Band-Aid across her nose and white gloves, who often stands at the gate excoriating dogs and their owners with tales of being trailed by the FBI, has just sat down next to me. She has a whippet. Whippets, she tells me, were dogs that hunted rats in the mines. "Wales, or Scotland or Ireland," she goes on. There being no room to break their necks in the small spaces, they twirled and twirled, snapping the rat's necks that way. "That's interesting," I say cautiously. Talk moves on and about, like a dog looking for a
good place to lie down. Somehow we speak of the old radio shows. Clyde Beatty, Sky King, Sergeant Preston of the Yukon. She asks do I remember the real-estate offering they made? I shake my head. "You could buy one inch in Alaska," she says. All day I can't get the idea of owning an inch of the Alaskan wilderness out of my head. I am searching for meaning in everything.
In the first weeks after his accident, Rich spoke in mysteries. It was as if he were now connected to some vast reservoir of wisdom, available only to those whose brains have been altered, a reservoir unencumbered by personality, quirks, history, habits. "It is interesting to think that one could run farther and longer and perhaps find the answer," he said one evening, drifting in and out of delirious talk. "What would you get to?" I asked, eager for the answer. "The allure of distance" was what he said, a dreamy phrase.
Last week, as he struggled to make sense of the world, unable to find words, my youngest daughter, Catherine, came to visit. "Do you know who I am?" she asked, and he peered at her intently. "Do you eat field mice?" he asked, a strange question we thought, until I realized the first three letters of her name spell "cat." Perhaps this was a glimpse of how the mind pieces things together after an assault, trying to rewire itself. " The goat's mouth is full of stones," he said one day, and I leave that as it is, a mystery. During the days when it is impossible to communicate in words, I get into his bed and we hold hands. Nap therapy. This is a familiar posture, something we can do without speech, without thinking.
How are you managing? friends ask. How are you doing this? They leave me food and flowers, they send me letters and messages. They pray. I love these people, I love my family. Doing what? I wonder. This is the path our lives have taken. A month ago I would have thought this life impossible. Sometimes I feel as if I'm trying to rescue a drowning man, and I only have time to rise to the surface for one gasp of air before I go back down again. There is an exhilaration to it, a high born only partly of exhaustion, and I find myself almost frighteningly alive. There is nothing like calamity for refreshing the moment. Ironically, the last several years my life had begun to feel shapeless, like underwear with the elastic gone, the days down around my ankles. Now there is an intensity to the humblest things—buying paper towels, laundry detergent, dog food, keeping the household running in Rich's absence. One morning I buy myself a necklace made of sea glass, and it becomes a talisman. Shopping contains the future. As my daughter Jennifer says, shopping is hope.