Bark: Stories (2 page)

But this, the Spam postcard and the note, he felt contained the correct mix of offhandedness and intent. This elusive mix—the geometric halfway point between stalker and Rip van Winkle—was important to get right in the world of middle-aged dating, he suspected, though what did he really know of this world? It had been so long, the whole thing seemed a kind of distant civilization, a planet of the apings!—graying, human flotsam with scorched internal landscapes mimicking the young, picking up where they had left off decades ago, if only they could recall where the hell that was. Ira had been a married man for fifteen years, a father for eight (poor little Bekka, now rudely transported between houses in a speedy, ritualistic manner resembling a hostage drop-off), only to find himself punished for an idle little nothing, nothing, nothing flirtation
with a colleague, punished with his wife’s
actual
affair and false business trips (Montessori conventions that never existed), and finally a petition for divorce mailed from a motel. Observing others go through them, he used to admire midlife crises, the courage and shamelessness and existential daring of them, but after he’d watched his own wife, a respectable nursery school teacher, produce and star in a full-blown one of her own, he found the sufferers of such crises not only self-indulgent but greedy and demented, and he wished them all weird unnatural deaths with various contraptions easily found in garages.

He received a postcard from Zora in return. It was of Van Gogh’s room in Arles. Beneath the clockface of the local postmark her handwriting was big but careful, some curlicuing in the
g
’s and
f
’s. It read,
Had such fun meeting you at Mike’s
. Wasn’t that precisely, word for word, what he had written to her? There was no
too
, no emphasized
you
, just the exact same words thrown back at him like in some lunatic postal Ping-Pong. Either she was stupid or crazy or he was already being too hard on her. Not being hard on people—“You
bark
at them,” Marilyn used to say—was something he was trying to work on. When he pictured Zora’s lovely face, it helped his tenuous affections. She had written her phone number and signed off with a swashbuckling
Z
—as in
Zorro
. That was cute, he supposed. He guessed. Who knew. He had to lie down.

He had Bekka for the weekend. She sat in the living room, tuned to Cartoon Network. She liked Road Runner and
Justice League
. Ira would sometimes watch her mesmerized face, the cartoons flashing on the creamy screen of her skin, her eyes still and wide, bright with reflected shapes caught there like holograms
in marbles. He felt inadequate as her father, but in general attempted his best: affection, wisdom, reliability, plus not ordering pizza every night, though tonight he had again caved in. Last week Bekka had said to him, “When you and Mommy were married we always had mashed potatoes for supper. Now you’re divorced and we always have spaghetti.”

“Which do you like better?” he had asked.

“Neither!” she had shouted, summing up her distaste for everything. “I hate them both.”

Tonight he had ordered the pizza half plain cheese, and half with banana peppers and jalapeños. The two of them sat together in front of
Justice League
, with TV trays, eating slices from their respective sides. Chesty, narrow-waisted heroes in bright colors battled their enemies with righteous confidence and, of course, laser guns. Bekka finally turned to him. “Mommy says that if her boyfriend Daniel moves in I can have a dog. A dog and a bunny.”

“
And
a bunny?” Ira said. When the family was still together, unbroken, the four-year-old Bekka, new to numbers and the passage of time, used to exclaim triumphantly to her friends, “Mommy and Daddy say I can have a dog! When I turn eighteen!” There’d been no talk of bunnies. But perhaps the imminence of Easter had brought this on. He knew Bekka loved animals. She had once, in a bathtime reverie, named her five favorite people, four of whom were dogs. The fifth was her own blue bike.

“A dog
and
a bunny,” Bekka repeated, and Ira had to repress images of the dog with the rabbit’s bloody head in its mouth.

“So, what do you think about that?” he asked cautiously, wanting to get her opinion on the whole Daniel thing.

Bekka shrugged and chewed. “Whatever,” she said, her new word for “You’re welcome,” “Hello,” “Good-bye,” and “I’m only eight.” “I really just don’t want all his stuff there. Already his car blocks our car in the driveway.”

“Bummer,” said Ira, his new word for “I must remain as neutral as possible” and “Your mother’s a whore.”

“I don’t want a stepfather,” Bekka said.

“Maybe he could just live on the steps,” Ira said, and Bekka smirked, her mouth full of mozzarella.

“Besides,” she said. “I like Larry better. He’s stronger.”

“Who’s Larry?” Ira said, instead of “Bummer.”

“He’s this other dude,” Bekka said. She sometimes referred to her mother as a “dudette.” “She’s a dudette, all right,” Ira would say.

“Bummer,” said Ira now. “Big, big bummer.”

He phoned Zora four days later, so as not to seem discouragingly eager. He summoned up his most confident acting. “Hi, Zora? This is Ira,” and then waited—narcissistically perhaps, but what else was there to say?—for her response.

“Ira?”

“Yes. Ira Milkins.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know who you are.”

Ira gripped the phone and looked down at himself, suddenly finding nothing there. He seemed to have vanished from the neck down. “We met last Sunday at Mike and Kate’s?” His voice quavered. If he ever actually succeeded in going out with her, he was going to have to take one of those date-rape drugs and just pass out on her couch.

“Ira? Ohhhhhhhhh—Ira. Yeah. The Jewish guy.”

“Yeah, the Jew. That was me.” Should he hang up now? He did not feel he could go on. But he must go on.
There
was a man of theater for you.

“That was a nice dinner,” she said.

“Yes, it was.”

“I usually skip Lent completely.”

“Me, too,” said Ira. “It’s just simpler. Who needs the fuss?”

“But sometimes I forget how reassuring and conjoining a meal with friends can be, especially at a time like this.”

Ira had to think about the way she’d used
conjoining
. It sounded New Agey and Amish, both.

“But Mike and Kate run that kind of house. It’s all warmth and good-heartedness.”

Ira thought about this. What other kind of home was there to run, if you were going to bother? Hard, cold, and mean: that had been his own home with Marilyn, at the end. It was like those experimental monkeys with the wire-monkey moms. What did the baby monkeys know? The wire mother was all they had, all they knew in their hearts, and so they clung to it, as had he, even if it was only a coat hanger.
Mom
. So much easier to carve the word into your arm. You were used to pain. You’d been imprinted. As a child, for a fifth-grade science project, in the basement of his house, he’d once tried to reproduce Konrad Lorenz’s experiment with baby ducks. But he had screwed up with the incubation lights and had cooked the ducks right in their eggs, stinking up the basement so much that his mother had screamed at him for days. Which was a science lesson of some sort—the emotional limits of the
Homo sapiens
working Jewish mom—but it was soft science, so less impressive.

“What kind of home do
you
run?” he asked.

“Home? Oh, I mean to get to one of those. Right now, actually, I’m talking to you from a pup tent.”

Oh, she was a funny one. Perhaps they would laugh and laugh their way into the sunset. “I
love
pup tents,” he said. What was a pup tent exactly? He’d forgotten.

“Actually, I have a teenage son, so I have no idea what kind of home I have anymore. Once you have a teenager, everything changes.”

Now there was silence. He couldn’t imagine Bekka as a teenager. Or rather, he could, sort of, since she often acted like one already, full of rage at the incompetent waitstaff that life had hired to take and bring her order.

“Well, would you like to meet for a drink?” Zora asked finally, as if she had asked it many times before, her tone a mingling of both weariness and the cheery, pseudoprofessionalism of someone in the dully familiar and official position of being single and dating.

“Yes,” said Ira. “That’s exactly why I called.”

“You can’t imagine the daily dreariness of routine pediatrics,” said Zora, not touching her wine. “Ear infection, ear infection, ear infection. Whoa. Here’s an exciting one: juvenile onset diabetes. Day after day you just have to look into the parents’ eyes and repeat the same exciting thing: ‘There are a lot of viruses going around.’ I had thought about going into pediatric oncology, because when I asked other doctors why they’d gone into such a seemingly depressing thing, they said, ‘Because the
kids
don’t get depressed.’ That seemed interesting to me. And hopeful.
But then when I asked doctors in the same field why they were retiring early, they said they were sick of seeing kids die. The kids don’t get depressed, they just die! These were my choices in med school. As an undergraduate I took a lot of art classes and did sculpture, which I still do a little, to keep those creative juices flowing! But what I would really like to do now is write children’s books. I look at some of those books out in the waiting room and I want to throw them in the fish tank. I think,
I could do better than that
. I started one about a hedgehog.”

“Now what’s a hedgehog exactly?” Ira was eyeing her full glass and his own empty one. “I get them mixed up with groundhogs and gophers.”

“They’re— Well, what does it matter if they are all wearing little polka-dotted clothes, vests and hats and things,” she said irritably.

“I suppose,” he said, now a little frightened. What was wrong with her? He did not like stressful moments in restaurants. They caused his mind to wander strangely to random thoughts like
Why are these things called
napkins
rather than
lapkins? or
I’ll bet God really loves butter
. He tried to focus on the visuals, what she was wearing, which was a silk, pumpkin-colored blouse he hesitated complimenting her on lest she think he was gay. Marilyn had once threatened to call off their wedding because he had strenuously complimented the fabric of her gown and then had shopped too long and discontentedly for his own tuxedo, failing to find just the right shade of “mourning dove,” a color he had read of in a wedding magazine. “Are you homosexual?” she had asked. “You must tell me now. I won’t make the same mistake my sister did.”

Perhaps Zora’s irritability was only creative frustration. Ira understood. Though his position was with the Historical Society’s
Human Resources Office, he liked to help with the society’s exhibitions, doing posters and dioramas and once even making a puppet for a little show the society had put on about the first governor. Thank God for meaningful work! He understood those small, diaphanous artistic ambitions that overtook people and could look like nervous breakdowns.

“What happens in your hedgehog tale?” Ira asked, then settled in to finish up his dinner, eggplant parmesan that he wished now he hadn’t ordered. He was coveting Zora’s wodge of steak. Perhaps he had an iron deficiency. Or perhaps it was just a desire for the taste of metal and blood in his mouth. Zora, he knew, was committed to meat. While everyone else’s cars were busy protesting the prospect of war or supporting the summoned troops, Zora’s Honda had a bumper sticker that said,
RED MEAT IS NOT BAD FOR YOU. FUZZY, GREENISH BLUE MEAT IS BAD FOR YOU
.

“The hedgehog tale? Well,” Zora began. “The hedgehog goes for a walk, because he is feeling sad—it’s based on a story I used to tell my son. The hedgehog goes for a walk and comes upon this strange yellow house that has a sign on it that says,
WELCOME, HEDGEHOG: THIS COULD BE YOUR NEW HOME
, and because he’s been feeling sad, the thought of a new home appeals. So he goes in and inside is a family of alligators— Well, I’ll spare you the rest, but you can get the general flavor of it from that.”

“I don’t know about that family of alligators.”

She was quiet for a minute, chewing her beautiful ruby steak.
“Every family is a family of alligators,” she said.

“Well—that’s certainly one way of looking at it.” Ira glanced at his watch.

“Yeah. To get back to the book. It gives me an outlet. I mean,
my job’s not terrible. Some of the kids are cute. But some are impossible, of course, some are disturbed, some are just spoiled and ill-behaved. It’s hard to know what to do. We’re not allowed to hit them.”

“You’re ‘not allowed to hit them’?” He could see she had now made some progress with her wine.

“I’m from Kentucky,” she said.

“Ah.” He drank from his water glass, stalling.

She chewed thoughtfully. Merlot was beginning to etch a ragged, scabby line in the dead skin of her bottom lip. “It’s like Ireland but with more horses and guns.”

“Not a lot of Jews down there.” He had no idea why he said half the things he said. Perhaps this time it was because he had once been a community-based historian, digging in archives for the genealogies and iconographies of various ethnic groups, not realizing that other historians generally thought this a sentimental form of history, shedding light on nothing; and though shedding light on nothing seemed not a bad idea to him, when it became available, he had taken the human resources job.

“Not too many,” she said. “I did know an Armenian family growing up. At least I
think
they were Armenian.”

When the check came, she ignored it, as if it were some fly that had landed and would soon be taking off again. So much for feminism. Ira pulled out his state-workers credit card and the waitress came by and whisked it away. There were, he was once told, four seven-word sentences that generally signaled the end of a relationship. The first was “I think we should see other people.” (Which always meant another seven-word sentence: “I am already sleeping with someone else.”) The second seven-word sentence was, reputedly, “Maybe you could just
leave the tip.” The third was “How could you again forget your wallet?” And the fourth, the killer of all killers, was “Oh, look, I’ve forgotten my wallet, too!”