Eileen

SUNDAY

That Sunday morning I woke up hungover on my cot in the attic, my father calling up to me to help him get ready for morning Mass. That meant buttoning his shirt, and holding the bottle to his lips because his hands were too shaky. I wasn’t very well myself, of course, vision still blurred from the whiskey, my body a limp rag wrung hard by the laxatives the night before.

“I’m cold,” my father said, shivering. He tugged at his unshaved jaw and winced, looked at me as if to say, “Get the razor.” And I did. I lathered up the cream and shaved him right there in the kitchen, standing over the sink full of dirty dishes, a salad bowl full of cigar ash, moldy bits of bread green as pennies here and there. It may not sound all that bad to you, but it was pretty grim living there. My father’s moods and explosions were exhausting. He was so often upset. And I was always afraid of displeasing him by accident, or else I was so angry that I would try to displease him deliberately. We played games like an old married couple, and he was always winning. “You smell like hell,” he said to me that morning as I curved the razor around his jaw.

So of course I felt like killing him sometimes. I could have slit his throat that morning. But I said nothing: I didn’t want him to know how much he displeased me. It was important to me that he not know he had the power to make me miserable. It was also important not to let on just how much I wanted to get away from him. The more I thought about leaving him, the more I worried he might chase after me. I figured he could rustle up his friends in the police department, call a statewide search for the car, plaster my face in “Wanted” posters up and down the eastern seaboard. But that was all just fantasy, really. I knew he’d forget all about me when I was gone. And it seems he did. Back then I reasoned that if I were to leave, someone would step up to take care of him. His sister could hire help. Joanie could make an effort for once. Not everything was my responsibility, I told myself. He’d be fine without me. What was the worst that could happen?

When my aunt arrived to pick him up that day, she beeped and we bustled out. Her name was Ruth. She was my father’s only sibling. My father waited on the porch — oh, for one of those icicles to break off and lodge in his brain — while I walked around to the driveway, unlocked the trunk of the car and pulled out a pair of his shoes.

“Not those,” he hollered. “Those have a hole.”

I pulled out another and held them up.

“OK,” he said. My aunt barely looked up at me, pinched face squinting from the glare on the snow. I waved as I passed her car. She did not wave back. On the porch I tied my father’s laces and sent him on his way.

What a good girl I was, in hindsight, buttoning my father’s shirt and tying his shoes and all. I knew in my heart that I was good, I suppose. Here was the crux of my dilemma: I felt like killing my father, but I didn’t want him to die. I think he understood. I’d probably told him as much the night before, despite my instinct toward secrecy. We’d stay up and drink together often, just my father and I. I have a vague memory from that Saturday night of laying my face down on the kitchen table and yawning, looking up at him with the bottle of whiskey in his one hand, gin in the other. “Not very nice, Eileen,” he’d said, referring, I think, to my splayed legs, lipstick all smeared. This wasn’t unusual for us. We weren’t friendly, but we did talk sometimes. We argued. I’d wave my hands around. I’d say too much. I did the same thing later on in life, when I drank with other men, mostly stupid men. I expected them to find everything about me interesting. I expected them to see my drunken wordiness as a kind of coy gesture, as though I were saying, “I’m just a child, innocent to my own foolishness. Aren’t I cute? Love me and I’ll turn a blind eye to your faults.” With those other men, this tactic earned me brief sessions of affection until I became soured and saw that I had defiled myself by appealing to them in the first place. I failed and failed with my father to win his affection in this way, blabbering on about my ideas, regurgitating barely read synopses from the backs of books at the kitchen table, talking about how I felt about myself, life, the times in which we lived. I could get very dramatic after just a few drinks. “People act like everything’s OK all the time. But it isn’t. Nothing is OK at all. People die. Children starve. Poor people are freezing to death out there. It’s not fair. It isn’t right. Nobody seems to care. La-dee-dah, they say. Dad. Dad!” I’d slap the table to make sure he was listening. “We’re in hell, aren’t we? This is hell, isn’t it?” He’d just roll his eyes. It drove me mad.

Once he’d gone off to church that morning, I cooked myself scrambled eggs with ketchup and heated a beer on the stove, my hangover cure of choice. That doesn’t work, of course. Don’t bother trying it. But it did feel good to eat after having emptied my guts into the basement toilet the night before. I felt I had a blank slate, a clean beginning, though I don’t think I showered that morning. I hated showering, especially in winter since the hot water was spotty. I liked to languish in my own filth as long as I could tolerate it. Why I did this, I can’t say for sure. It certainly seems like a rather lame way to rebel, and furthermore it filled me with constant anxiety that others were sniffing my body and judging me by its odor: disgusting. My father said it himself: I smelled like hell. I dressed myself in my mother’s old Sunday clothes — gray trousers, black sweater, hooded woolen parka. I put on my snow boots and drove to the library. I’d just finished looking through a brief history of Suriname and a book on how to tell the future from looking at the stars. The former had great pictures of nearly naked men and old topless women. I recall one photograph of a monkey suckling a woman’s nipple, but perhaps I’m inventing. I liked twisted things like that. My curiosity for the stars is obvious: I wanted something to tell me my future was bright. I can imagine myself saying at the time that life itself was like a book borrowed from the library — something that did not belong to me and was due to expire. How silly.

I can’t say I’ve ever really understood what it means to be Catholic. When Joanie and I were little, our mother would send us to church with our father every Sunday. Joanie never seemed to protest, but she’d just sit there during the liturgy reading Nancy Drew, chewing gum. She refused to kneel and stand along with the rest of us and said, “Blah blah blah” instead of the “Our Father,” twirled her hair. She was pretty enough, aloof enough already at nine or ten for our father to overlook any flawed manners. But at five, I was still plump, pale, eyes small and squinty — I didn’t find out I needed glasses until I was thirty — and I suppose my aura carried enough doubt and anxiety to fill my dad with shame. “Don’t embarrass me,” he’d mutter on our way up the church steps. He’d be greeted left and right by cheerful, brownnosing members of the congregation, X-villers who must have thought it advantageous to be in the good graces of a man in blue. Dad wore his uniform to church, of course. Or maybe they were all scared of him. He certainly scared me. I remember he’d leave his gun in the glove box while we were at Mass, perhaps the only time he spent without it those days. “Good morning, Officer Dunlop,” someone would say. Dad would shake hands, put an arm around Joanie, a hand on my head, and stop to chat. If I was ever asked a question or received any attention at all, my father would leer down at me as though to say, “Be normal, look happy, act right.” Inevitably I would disappoint him. I’d go mute or mess up my words, grimace and tear up when some friend of his tried to pinch my cheek. I hated church.

“Where is Mrs. Dunlop this morning?” someone always asked. The excuses my father would give were that she wasn’t feeling well, that she was visiting her mother, but she sends her very best. My mother never once came to Mass. The only time I remember her setting foot in that church was for my grandfather’s funeral. When we got home Sunday afternoons — Joanie and I sat through endless hours of Bible study taught by an elderly nun, none of whose teachings penetrated into my consciousness one bit — the house would be only slightly less disheveled, and our mother would be lying on the couch in the living room, reading a magazine, a bottle of vermouth stuck between her thighs, cigarette smoke floating above her head in the stuffy afternoon sunlight like a brooding storm cloud.

“Promise you’ll visit me in hell, Eileen?” she’d ask.

“Go to your room,” said my father.

My mother rolled her eyes at my father’s superstitions, how he’d cross himself before eating, look up at the ceiling whenever he was hopeful or mad. “God is for dummies,” she told us. “People are scared of dying, that’s all. Listen to me, girls.” I remember when she said this, pulling us aside one day after our aunt Ruth had come over and scolded us for being lazy, for being spoiled brats, or something like that. She and our mother didn’t get along. “God is a made-up story,” our mother told us, “like Santa Claus. There is nobody watching you when you’re alone. You decide for yourself what’s right and wrong. There are no prizes for good little girls. If you want something, fight for it. Don’t be a fool.” I don’t think she was ever so caring as when she delivered this terrifying pronouncement: “To hell with God. And to hell with your father.”

I remember sitting for hours on my bed after that, picturing all of eternity laid out before me. God was, in my mind, a white-haired old man in a robe — not unlike the man my father would later turn into — presiding over the world, marking papers with red pencil. And then there was my sad, mortal body. It seemed impossible that such a God could care what I did with my little life, but perhaps I was special, I thought. Perhaps He was saving me for good things. I pricked my finger with a safety pin and sucked the blood out. I decided I would only pretend to believe in God since that seemed just as good as real faith, which I didn’t have. “Pray like you mean it!” my father would shout when it was my turn to say grace. I’m not as angry at my father for his idiotic moralism as I am for the way he treated me. He had no loyalty to me. He was never proud of me. He never praised me. He simply didn’t like me. His loyalty was to the gin, and his twisted war against the hoodlums, his imaginary enemies, the ghosts. “Devil’s spawn,” he’d say, waving his gun around.

When I pulled up to the X-ville library that Sunday, I parked and slogged through the slush, but the big red door was locked. It was a small library in the town’s old meeting house, and the one librarian — Mrs. Buell, I still remember her name — kept hours according to her personal schedule. I visited often enough to know all the books there by the look of their spines, the order they appeared on the shelves. In some books I’d even memorized the stains on their pages — spaghetti sauce spilt here, ant squashed there, booger smeared over here. I remember sensing something hopeful in the breeze that morning. I detected a hint of spring in it, although it was late December. My favorite part of drinking too much was the enthusiasm and vigor I felt at certain points of my hangover the day afterward. It sometimes carried a kind of blind excitement — mania, it’s called now. The good feeling always petered out into gloom by noon, but in that bright light of Sunday morning, I pushed the books through the return slot for Mrs. Buell and decided to take a drive to Boston.

If I’d had any idea that this would be the last Sunday I’d ever spend in X-ville, I might have spent it packing a suitcase surreptitiously up in my attic, or darkly meditating on the house I’d never see again. I could have taken the time and space to weep at the kitchen table, mourn my entire youth while my father was at church. I could have kicked the walls, torn at the peeling paint and wallpaper, spat on every floor. But I got on the highway. I didn’t know I’d soon be gone.

Roads were slick with melting ice, I remember. I rolled the windows down so as not to be poisoned by the exhaust fumes. I pulled on the knit hat I’d found a few nights previous, let the icy cold air freeze my face a little. Several times that winter with the car windows up I’d nearly fallen asleep at the wheel. One night on my way home from Randy’s, I think, I veered off the road and into a snowbank. Luckily my foot had fallen off the pedal, so there was no great impact. On that Sunday drive out of X-ville, I thought about stopping at my old college on the way to Boston, but I couldn’t summon the courage. I’d lived in that small college town barely over a year, in a dorm with other girls. I went to class, ate in the cafeteria, et cetera. It felt good to have a coffee percolator, a set of sheets of my own, and to be away, albeit not far, from home. Then I was pulled out of school halfway through my sophomore year and forced back to X-ville to care for my mother, though “care for” is not quite the right way to say it. I was terrified of my mother. She was a mystery to me, and by then I didn’t “care for” her in the least. Since she was sick, I tended to her as a nurse would, but there was nothing warm or caring about what I did.

I was secretly glad that I had to leave school. I hadn’t received very good grades in college, and the prospect of failing my classes, classes my father was paying for me to pass, had kept me up at night. I’d been in some trouble with the dean already since I’d chosen to “fall ill” and stay in bed instead of taking my quarterly exams. Of course, back home I blamed my parents for my misery, wished I was in school again learning to use a typewriter, studying the history of art, Latin, Shakespeare, whatever nonsense lay in store.

Even with that hat I wore, the whipping cold air was so severe that I had to roll the windows up. You can’t imagine how cold it was driving down that frozen highway. I played the radio and drove fast for a while, but there was some traffic approaching the city — an accident up ahead, I think — and as I sat there waiting for the cars to move, the wooziness suddenly hit me. My eyelids began to droop and my head felt heavy. I was dead tired. My brain ached. Those fumes get into the brain tissue. I believe I have permanent damage to this day. Still, I loved that car. I lay my head on the steering wheel for what couldn’t have been more than a minute, and when I woke up, cars were streaming past me, honking their horns. So I drove, and I must have swerved out of my lane as I struggled to stay alert because then there was a police car behind me, a face in my rearview mirror, a black gloved hand motioning for me to pull over. In my confusion, I assumed it was my father’s face in the mirror, that he’d somehow followed me out of town. I still had that picture of him as a cop in my head, in his uniform, laughing, ruddy cheeks and hands, an ominous glimmer in his eye. The man had never worn a coat as long as he was on the force. “You can’t cover up your uniform with a coat,” he said. And so he’d always been sick, his nose always dripping, his body tense, shoulders high up by his ears, shifting his weight from side to side. You can picture him. Of course, my father was sitting in Mass at this time, and he hadn’t worn a uniform in years. But I always thought I saw him everywhere. Years after I left X-ville and still today I sometimes think I see him, swinging a baton at the park, coming out of a bar or coffee shop, slumped over at the top of the stairs.

I pulled onto the shoulder and rolled my window down. “I’m sorry, officer,” I told the cop. “It gets stuffy in here, and my heating is broke.”

I remember the policeman was young, thin faced with bags under his large pale blue eyes. He reminded me of a newscaster, asked the usual questions. I tried to speak with my mouth closed, worried he would smell the alcohol on my breath.

“Oh, my gosh,” I said, rubbing my eyes. “I’m so, so sorry.” I looked up at him imploringly. “My father is sick and I was up all night at his bedside. It’s a very difficult time.” This was the excuse I thought would solicit the most compassion. But as I said the words, my throat clenched like a fist and a well of tears rose to my eyes, as though I believed in my pathetic little story, as though I cared so deeply for my father and was just heartbroken that I might have to face life without him. I was just beside myself, barely able to steer my car straight. It was very dramatic. I ground the heels of my palms into my eye sockets and cleared my throat. The policeman looked unamazed.

“Tell you what,” he said. He let me go once I promised to pull off at the next exit and get a cup of coffee. I assented. “I wouldn’t want anything bad to happen right when your father needs you most.” What a big heart he had. I put on my death mask and nodded. I have always hated the police. But I felt compelled to obey them then. So I did take the next exit.

I found myself on a street called Moody. Of course I did. A Christmas banner hung above the road, hitched between two electric poles. A woman in a bright red parka loped by me, pulled by a pair of German shepherds as though on a sled. I didn’t like dogs. Not because they scared me — they didn’t — but because their deaths were so much harder to take than people’s. My dog since childhood, Mona, a Scottish terrier, the runt of its litter, passed away the week before my mother died. Without hesitation I can say my heart was broken as much over the loss of that dog as by the death of my own mother. I imagine I’m not the only person on Earth to feel that way, but for a long time the feelings seemed shameful. Perhaps had I a Dr. Frye to confess this to, I might have uncovered something which would have brought me relief, a new perspective, but I never did. Anyway, I don’t trust those people who poke around sad people’s minds and tell them how interesting it all is up there. It’s not interesting. My mother was mean and that dog was nice. One doesn’t need a college degree.

The coffee shop on the corner of Moody Street had windows dotted with cutout elves and a Santa face. Blinking Christmas lights and holly trimmed the door. I ordered a cup of hot tea and sat, still angry and worried about the car. It would not be a reliable getaway vehicle when I eventually chose to make my great departure, I realized. Given the cold and the drowsiness I’d felt just minutes after driving with the windows rolled up, I knew I would not get farther than Moody Street in that car without freezing or fainting when it came time to leave for good. So this little day trip had been something of a road test, a dress rehearsal. And the car had failed. I was demoralized, to say the least. I’d have to wait until spring. And even then, would I really go?

The waitress stood and fixed her apron strings and chewed her gum. Her uniform was mustard yellow with a white collar. Over it she wore a pink sweater with shiny black beads embroidered along the neck. They looked like busy ants swarming at her throat. I remember it well. My own sweater was a black wool cardigan, pilly and snagged. My pants were sprinkled with coffee stains across the lap. I pulled my parka back on, suddenly self-conscious and angry. Why should I have cared who saw me in a bad sweater, who might have judged my outfit in a nearly empty coffee shop? I didn’t care. Let people stare at my shabbiness. Let them throw rocks at my unwashed hair. I was better than the lot of them. I’d leave them all behind to kiss the seat I’d sat on. I told myself these things, and to further convince myself, I ordered some chocolate ice cream. I watched the waitress labor with the scooper, arm deep in a freezer, pink sweater pushed up over her dainty elbows. She served it in an oblong metal dish with whipped cream, chopped nuts and a maraschino cherry on top. I spooned it into my mouth like a starving orphan, let the chocolate drip down over my chin. I didn’t care. When I gulped the hot tea afterward my teeth screeched and my head nearly exploded. I don’t remember what ration of whiskey my father had allowed me before he sucked the bottle dry the night before, but he must have been feeling generous. Even at my flimsy weight I could usually tolerate quite a bit of booze. Most weekends I wasn’t nearly as shaky.

With the ice cream sloshing remorsefully inside my stomach, I paid and went outside, feeling very sorry for myself. I dragged my heel across a pane of ice while waiting at the crosswalk, then stomped the edge of my boot down on it. It cracked, turned milky, but didn’t crumble. Funny the things one remembers. I spent most Sundays holed up at home or driving to and from Randy’s house while my father was out communing with God or whatever he thought he was doing at church. Only occasionally did Aunt Ruth come inside when she dropped him off after Mass. When she did, she’d hold her purse tight, keep her gloves on, squinch her lips shut so hard they turned white. “Get your father a cup of coffee” is the most she’d ever say to me. My father would simply ignore me when Aunt Ruth was around. “Hire someone to come and clean,” she told him once. “Your children are obviously busy doing other things.” I was standing in the doorway as they spoke, my father settling into his kitchen recliner, Aunt Ruth sitting at the table, careful not to touch anything.

“Eileen takes after her mother,” my father had replied. “Good for nothing.”

“Charlie, don’t speak ill of the dead.”

“Don’t be such a goody-goody,” he snorted. “All that woman ever did was spend my money and snore.”

It was true, my mother had liked to shop. And she snored so loudly sometimes it sounded like a locomotive chugging through the house. As a child, I often dreamt of fast trains, smoke tufting through black nights spangled with stars, sailing across the country, away from X-ville, tracks rumbling beneath me, nearly shaking me awake.

“Does the girl ever clean? Does she cook?” my aunt asked.

“I don’t eat much,” my father answered in my defense. “My gout.” When they finally saw me standing there, my aunt just clucked her tongue and fiddled with the handle of her pocketbook.

“Take out the trash, Eileen,” said my dad, as though to appease his sister. I took out the trash. I always just swallowed my tears, held up a mask of cold stone when I felt bad. I was glad to have gone for that drive that Sunday. I may have fallen short of my goal of reaching Boston, but at least I’d avoided another painful interaction with my aunt. She had flat, silvery hair and a freckled forehead that gave her a sort of boiled and sick look, like a pickled egg. I really didn’t like her.

I couldn’t tell you the name of the town I’d ended up in, but Moody Street was perfectly pleasant and festive. I meandered up a block of charming storefront displays. Everything was closed, of course. Back then you were hard-pressed to buy a stick of gum on Sundays. On my way back to the car, I passed a narrow alley and saw a teenage couple kissing—“petting” as we called it. I remember the scene clearly. I caught sight of them the moment the girl’s tongue slid into the boy’s mouth. I was so impressed. The soft pink color of the girl’s tongue, the way the clean winter light reflected on its sleek surface, and the contrast in its color and texture to the pure, aquiline face, so beautiful. Sitting in my car, I couldn’t shake the image — such erotic force seemed impossible. Of course I’d heard of French kissing and seen the lolling heads of young people necking on the 1-H lookout, but this view of it was as though I’d had X-ray lenses. It struck me just how forward the girl was, how gutsy, how bold to kiss that way, and so of course I thought to myself that I’d never have the guts to be anything like her. The boy was impassive, eyes shut, mouth wide, arms enfolding the girl, the collar of his plaid wool jacket flipped up. It all haunted me and compounded my headache and fatigue into severe anxiety. Sexual excitement nearly always made me feel sick. At home I could have taken a scalding bath, washed vigorously, but I was far from home. So I opened the car door and leaned out and scooped up a fistful of crystalline snow and stuffed it down the front of my trousers and into my underpants. It was very cold and very painful, but I left it there to melt as I drove. I rolled down the windows. How I didn’t catch pneumonia is beyond me.

As I did oftentimes when I was disturbed, I headed back up to Randy’s. On the drive I thought of his thick arms, his top lip, sensuous yet boyish, the sideways glint of his smile which he tried to hide behind a comic book or some funny magazine. Would he miss me when I was gone? Perhaps he would. “Oh, Eileen,” he’d say to the cops when they’d investigate my disappearance. “She left before I ever got the nerve to ask her on a date. I missed out and I’ll always regret it.” It soothed me to think of us together, perhaps reunited after several years which I’d have spent becoming a real woman, his type — whatever that meant — and we’d embrace each other and cry at the sadness of our lost love and separation. “I was so blind,” Randy would say, kissing my fingers, tears coasting down his beautiful cheekbones. I loved a crying man — a weakness which led me into countless affairs with whiners and depressives. I suspected Randy cried rarely, but when he did, it was a thing of great beauty. Did I really drive by his apartment that afternoon, my seat wet with melting snow? Of course I did. I can’t say what I was looking for exactly, though I was ever hopeful that he might come out and profess his love, save me, run away with me, solve all my problems. As I idled in front of his place, I was suddenly overcome with nausea. I opened the car door and vomited. The gray, melted ice cream sank into the snowbank, then disappeared.

As soon as I got home that afternoon, I ran upstairs to my mother’s room and peeled off my cold, wet pants and underwear. My father, sitting on the toilet across the dim hall, swung the bathroom door open to ask, “Where’ve you been?”

I pulled on a pair of old woolen tights and went and found a spare bottle of gin I’d hidden in the closet and handed it to my father. He took it and flipped the light on with his free hand. When his newspaper slipped from his knees, I caught sight of the dark patch of pubic hair in his lap. That terrified me. I saw, too, his gun sitting on the edge of the sink. I’d wondered about that gun from time to time. In my darkest moments, I’d imagined easing it out from under my father’s sleeping body and pulling the trigger. I’d aim straight through the back of my skull so that I’d slump down over him, my blood and brains oozing all over his cold, flaccid chest. But honestly, even in those darkest moments, the idea of anyone examining my naked corpse was enough to keep me alive. I was that ashamed of my body. It also concerned me that my demise would have no great impact, that I could blow my head off and people would say, “That’s all right. Let’s get something to eat.”

That night I lay on my cot and poked at my belly, counted my ribs with gloved fingers. It was cold up in the attic, and that cot was flimsy. It just barely bore my weight: one hundred pounds with clothes on, if that. If I used too many blankets, the joints of the cot would wiggle, and with every breath the frame would rock and sway like a boat in the tide and I couldn’t sleep. I could have found a wrench to tighten up the bolts and screws or whatnot, but like with the car’s broken exhaust pipe, I couldn’t be bothered to deal with fixing things. I preferred to wallow in the problem, dream of better days. The attic reminded me of where a visiting uncle would sleep, if I’d had one. A good uncle, maybe an army man, inclined to build things, fix things, who never complained of cold or thirst, who would eat the worst cut of beef or chicken full of fat and gristle without a second thought. I imagined his earlobes would be long and flabby and his shoulders small, but his body muscled, eyes wide. Perhaps that good uncle was my real father, I fantasized. I sometimes scanned my mother’s wardrobe for evidence of adultery. The discovery of food stains, coffee drippings down the front of a cotton blouse, or lipstick smeared on a yellowed collar was not exactly like hearing a voice from the grave, but I guess I hoped to find something useful. A hint, a greeting, proof that she’d loved me, anything. I don’t know. I don’t know why I wore her clothes the way I did, for years after she died. I let my dad assume it was some sort of reluctance to part with the dead woman, an old dress like a badge of loyalty, carrying on my mother’s spirit, whatever nonsense. But I think I really wore her clothes to mask myself, as though if I walked around in such a costume, nobody would really see me.

I remember sitting up on my cot under a bare lightbulb and surveying the attic. It’s a charming picture of misery. There were loose drawers from a dresser stacked full of moth-eaten linens that had belonged to my mother’s mother. There were boxes of old books and papers, an old phonograph and several crates of records that I had never tried to play. The sloping ceiling forced me to duck and then crawl toward the window facing the backyard, where not much could be distinguished apart from the white snow and a few bare, black tree branches, everything lit up violet under the dwindling afternoon sky. Somewhere buried down there was Mona, my dead dog. I thought of my mother when she lay sick in bed, her hands in a pile of mis-knitted afghan, complaining to my father at the top of her lungs that were there a God in this world, He was a bastard. “I should be dead, already,” she insisted. I dutifully boiled the chicken soup on the stove, day in, day out, and brought her the clear broth in a green salad bowl big enough to catch the spills during the struggle of having to feed the woman spoon by spoon, her arms flailing weakly and haphazardly in resistance.

One day I went out back to hang the laundry and found the dog belly-up in the uncut grass, tall and dried and dead in the bleaching sun. Perhaps God took the wrong soul, I thought in a freak moment of sentimentality, and I cried quietly, back pressed up against the house. I left the wet laundry in the basket, but draped a sopping pillowcase over Mona’s body. It took a day for me to muster the courage to go back out there. By then the laundry had congealed and dried, and the sight of the dead dog when I lifted the pillowcase made me gag and spill the contents of my stomach — chicken, vermouth — into the dry dirt. It took me several hours to dig a sufficient hole with a trowel, push Mona in with my foot — I couldn’t bring myself to touch her with my hands — and cover the body with the brittle earth. A week later, when my father kicked over the dog’s dish of stale and smelly kibble, he simply said, “Damn dog,” and so I threw the whole thing out, and told no one. A few days later my mother was dead, and I let the tears flow openly at last. It’s a romantic story and it may not be accurate at this point since I’ve gone over it again and again for years whenever I’ve felt it necessary or useful to cry.

Looking out over the icy backyard that night, I cried again for my dog, sorry that she would have to stay there in X-ville for all of eternity. I considered digging up her bones so I could take her with me. I really considered putting on my ski pants, a heavy wool sweater, snow boots, mittens, the tight knit cap, and going out there with a shovel. I hadn’t marked the grave with anything, but I felt that Mona would call to me, that I would intuitively know where to break ground. Of course I didn’t even try. I’d have needed some kind of pickax, the kind they use in graveyards. Imagine the labor necessary to bury a whole person without a machine to do the digging. It’s not like in the movies. It’s not that easy. How did they bury people in the winter in the old days, I wondered. Did they leave the bodies out to freeze until the spring? If they did do that, they must have kept them somewhere safe, in the basement perhaps, to lie in silence in the dark and cold until the thaw.