Growing Girls (28 page)

“What?
What?”

But she responds with just more of the same, a lot of jiggling and words I can only imagine. I don’t think it’s fair. Dogs have so much going for them, they should have words. If they had words they could tell stories. They could sing. They could paint pictures and have art shows. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if just one other species besides us had the gift of self-expression?

There are those who think animals do, or imagine they do, or hope. You read all the time of people holding out for the real story of all that dolphin chatter. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking jokes. I’m talking Broadway shows written by and starring dogs. I’m talking art shows with dog art critics who aren’t super dogs, just regular dogs. Homeless dogs at the pound and Park Avenue poodles who go about their days chowing down on Alpo in their stainless steel bowls, but they also use the phone and call their friends and schedule outings.

But maybe I’m just elevating the spoken word to a status it
doesn’t deserve. Millions of species have probably a million ways of communicating that we’ll never understand.

I knew two old lady identical twins who lived together and one did the shopping and if the other needed chicken soup while the sister was already at the store, all she would have to do was think
chicken soup, chicken soup
and sure enough the sister would throw a few cans in the cart.

Skeptics doubt me when I tell them about those twins, but it’s usually an easier sell than explaining the communication I have with my dog. One night, seemingly out of nowhere, I got the sense that something was wrong with Betty. I was just sitting there watching
Jeopardy!
and I thought,
Where’s Betty?
I stood out on the porch and called her. Usually one “Betty!” followed by a high-pitched “Weee-oooo!” will yield the sound of her dog tag clanking and soon enough I’ll see her little blonde self come prancing up the path.

But not this time. Maybe she was just busy sniffing in the woods or wasn’t quite finished chewing a stick—these things happened. But I couldn’t let go of the sense that something was wrong with her.

“Betty!” I yelled. I could see all the way down to the barn. The moon was out by then, bright as a spotlight. This was one of those amazing facts of country life: You could do needlepoint under a moon like that.

“Betty!” I walked up our road, then down the path to the small pond in our back field.

“Betty!”

This was crazy. Why wasn’t she answering? This was not like
her. I continued walking and then, in the stillness, I heard something. A kind of chirp.

“Betty?”

“Eeet!”

I walked in the direction of the chirp. It was in the woods? Or back up on the road? On such a still night, echoes play tricks. “Beeetty!”

“Eeet!”

She was calling me. Why was it such a pathetically weak call?

“Beeeettty!”

“Eeet!”

The sound was coming from the top of our steep hill. Walking up that hill, you usually have to take breaks to catch your breath. But this time I ran straight up, like a lady lifting a car off her kid. “I’m coming, girly! I’m coming!”

I found her under a naked maple tree, her little body vibrating crazily. “What?
What?
” I ran to her and threw my arms around her and saw that her leg was caught in the jaws of a coyote trap that some idiot had taken the liberty of setting on our property.

“Oh, girly!” I had no idea how to release a coyote trap. I used my fingernails to try and dig its anchor out of the ground, and then I got a stick. “How long have you been up here? How did this happen? Oh, sweetie.”

Of course, I got her out. I hugged her and carried her down the hill. Her leg was bruised and cut, but it would heal just fine. Had I not found her and freed her, I don’t know what
would have happened. Would she have been easy bait for a pack of coyotes? Would she have chewed her own leg off to get free? You hear about that sort of thing. You hear about men trapped under fallen trees and cutting off their own feet. “Oh, girly.” All night long and forever after that I wondered how Betty was able to get my attention, get me outside there looking for her. How? How in the name of Alex Trebek did she let me know? It was a feeling in my skin, a smell, or maybe something in the wind. The only thing I’m sure it wasn’t was the spoken word.

Fortunately, that was the last in a long line of mishaps for Betty. The bee stings that nearly killed her, the time she cut her paw on a chunk of glass and nearly bled to death in the creek. On average, Betty has suffered through two traumatic events per year for most of her life. The coyote trap might have been her swan song. After that she stuck closer to home, most days under my desk, where we have our conversations, discuss current events, and sometimes get into debates. But usually we agree. Really, we see the world remarkably similarly.

I was just talking to her about that dog in Nairobi who found the baby.

“You keep saying you’re not impressed, and yet you keep talking about it,” she said.

“That’s exactly my point,” I said.

She was lying on her back with her feet sticking straight up in the air, a posture of approval. Then she said: “Well, did they give that dog the chance to say goodbye to the kid?”

“I don’t know, girly,” I said. “I do not know.”

“Well,” she wisely observed, “I’m sure it was an emotional time for everybody.”

Betty is already older than me. In dog years she’s about the age of my mom. She listens better than my mom, and certainly better than my kids. It takes years of togetherness to get like this.

Now they’re saying Sasha doesn’t have apraxia. They’re saying that, anyway, the original diagnosis was “mild” apraxia, and now that they see how quickly Sasha is acquiring speech, they don’t believe the apraxia diagnosis was accurate.

“Quickly?” I said.

She was still largely unintelligible to anyone but those of us who spent our days with her and knew how to translate Sasha-speak.

They said in her recent tests she could, at age four, form all the sounds of a profoundly delayed three-year-old, which was certainly not good, but wasn’t consistent with apraxia.

“So what do you think it is?” I said to Miss Joy, the speech therapist Sasha had been seeing three times a week for the previous nine months.

She shrugged. “There’s so much we don’t know.” I wasn’t sure if she was referring to the speech therapy industry or perhaps to Sasha’s earliest months in the orphanage where who-knows-what happened that might have so severely interrupted her ability to acquire language.

It didn’t matter. The therapists simply didn’t know what was wrong, but the good news was Sasha now spoke the garbled
language of hope. “With my young apraxic kids,” Miss Joy said, “I can’t get any of the sounds out of them that Sasha is now able to produce.” She was recommending we stop therapy for about six months, see what she was able to do on her own, and then retest her. Her guess was that Sasha had been through the worst of it, that her little brain had finally begun to figure this language thing out, and that we would now see tremendous progress.

“We see this sometimes,” she said. “All of a sudden something clicks, like an engine that finally turned over, and pretty soon everything is running fine.”

“So it’s just like … an ignition problem? Like she just needed a new starter?”

“Sort of.”

She gave us some exercises to do, most of them involving sentence structure since, inexplicably, Sasha couldn’t seem to master certain sequences. “The boy is running” came out “The boy running” or “The boy is run.” Ask her to do the verb with the “ing” and she got completely flummoxed.

So we were supposed to do drills. We were supposed to work on pronouns. We were supposed to pretend not to understand her when she jumbled syllables, flipped words haphazardly this way and that inside a sentence.

“You have to insist that she speak
our
language, not hers,” Miss Joy told us.

“You don’t think I’ll be stifling her creativity?” I said.

“Uh, no,” Miss Joy said. “No.”

Right, then. Of course. Stupid question. Where did that
come from? Whew. Parents go either one way or the other on this one, I think. There are those who regard their children as lanky, crazy vines that need to be tacked onto trellises, pruned, trained to grow straight and tall and to bloom their maximum blooms seasonally, and on command.

And then there are those of us who stand in awe, so amazed by what we see growing in so many ways we could have never imagined, that we are humbled and afraid to inflict our own idiotic ideas upon the process. I’d been having a lot of awe attacks with regard to Sasha.

We shared cookies and juice with Miss Joy, a little goodbye party, and then Sasha gave Miss Joy a potted geranium. “Woo yike it?” she said to Miss Joy, who nodded enthusiastically and hugged her. “I love it,” she said. “And I love you, too, sweetie.”

“I wuff woo,” Sasha said, throwing her arms around her and planting a kiss on her left eye.

“Awwww,” said the gathered crowd of therapists. “Awwww, she is so sweet!”

Sweet. This is Sasha’s gift. It isn’t really about being sweet. It’s about winning. This is her game. She came up with this one all on her own—and maybe her lack of language had something to do with it. I don’t know. But Sasha can make anyone feel like a million bucks. She knows exactly how to do it and she has made of it something of a fine art.

Her usual targets are women, although she can easily enough work the magic on men. It happens at parties, or the playground, or whenever she is in a safe place with a cast of at least vaguely familiar characters. She’ll pick one. She’ll hold
her arms up. “Up! Up!” she’ll say, her posture pleading and pathetic and convincing. The person will say, “Me?” The person will say, “Aw.” The person will look at me to see if it’s okay if they pick her up and I’ll nod. Soon she will be in the person’s arms. She will look that person in the eye, and sometimes will place one hand on each cheek, grabbing full attention.

“Woo,” she will say. “I yike woo.”

Anybody can translate that. Anybody. And each of the anybodies are transformed into
somebodies
, right then and there, thanks to Sasha. They glow. They have been
chosen
. They hug her. “Aww.” They tell her how sweet she is. They go about their days feeling special. (And she just got a ride from here to there, on somebody’s hip.)

Sasha has thus charmed preschool teachers and swimming instructors and dry cleaner clerks and even, for my sake, a judge at traffic court who let me off with a smile. She is my secret weapon and she knows it and so I have to be careful. She and I, we could be criminals together, like in
Paper Moon We
could sell Bibles to Sunday School teachers and simultaneously clean out the church coffers. She could dance a jig for the pharmacist while I slip in the back and steal the drugs. It’s not good to imagine entering a life of crime with your kid, no, there is nothing good you can say about it. But when you have a kid who knows how to turn on the charm this well, your dreams go into overdrive.

She is the only reason the principal at school is nice to me, if you can call making eye contact nice. It’s a big step for Miss Martha, an ex-nun with a military haircut who might have had
a very promising career in the marines, or else in the air force piloting fast planes with explosives. She is a serious woman dedicated to order, one of those people who can make you feel like a slob on impact. Sasha knows how to get through. Sasha will hold her skinny little arms up, pathetically. “Up! Up!” It’s all so urgent and pitiful even Miss Martha can’t resist, so she will pick Sasha up. And so Sasha will go at her with her cheek, and an embrace, until she has that cheek locked right there on Miss Martha’s jaw. The lady can’t help but melt. “Aw,” Miss Martha will say, awkwardly. “Aw.”

“Woo nice yay-yay,” Sasha will say, which in Sasha-speak translates to “You’re a nice lady.” She says this in such a way as to suggest that she does not say it to virtually every person who answers her pathetic plea to carry her, which she does.

“Well, thank you,” Miss Martha will reply. You can tell the inner nice lady dying to get out has just been activated. She’ll smile broadly in a way that makes her face look grotesque, so unused to the position is that face.

Sasha will simply rest her head on Miss Martha’s shoulder, and sometimes she’ll give her a little pat on the back. Onlookers will actually gasp at the transformation, and I’ll stand there watching, feeling not exactly proud, but certainly inspired.
God, Sasha’s got that lady so transfixed I could probably go Into her office and root through her files
… I’ll find myself thinking, shifting into opportunist mode, a clever fox, and then I’ll snap out of it.
Sasha, what are you doing to me? What do you do to people? You can hardly even talk and yet you have the power to convert
.

Sasha has, I know, a very promising political career, and I am doing everything I can to stay on her good side.

A few days ago, my mother sent me an e-mail:

This came through in 18-point type, her default setting because she has so much trouble with her eyes. My mother isn’t much of a typist. She is eighty-two. She might be eighty-three. She can’t remember. She’d have to ask my father if you really wanted to know. Details have never been her thing.

A whole new relationship has emerged between my mom and me ever since she got the computer, her first. She is now Mrs. E-mail. Her favorite thing to do is to send animated greeting cards. If she sees a good one that happens to be, say, a Father’s Day card, she’ll e-mail it to me anyway and tell me to just go on and ignore the greeting and watch the dancing duck.

“Cool!” I’ll write to her. “Thanks!”

Then she’ll call me and we’ll discuss the transaction. How cute the duck is. How amazing it is that she knew how to send an e-card. The minor technical difficulties conquered. I’ll tell
her how great she is. How proud I am of her. We’ll hang up and an hour later I’ll get another.