Let's Take the Long Way Home (2 page)

By which I meant that I might somehow sidestep the cruelty of an intolerable loss, one rendered without the willful or natural exit signs of drug overdose, suicide, or old age. These I had encountered, and there had been the common theme of tragic agency (if only he’d taken the lithium; if only he hadn’t tried to smuggle the cocaine) or rueful acceptance (she had a good long life). But no one I had loved—no one I counted among the necessary pillars of life—had died suddenly, too young, full of determination not to go. No one had gotten the bad lab report, lost the hair, been told to get her affairs in order. More important, not Caroline. Not the best friend, the kid sister, the one who had joked for years that she would bring me soup decades down the line, when I was too aged and frail to cook.

FROM THE BEGINNING
there was something intangible and even spooky between us that could make strangers mistake us as sisters or lovers, and that sometimes had friends refer to us by each other’s name: A year after Caroline’s death, a mutual friend called out to
me at Fresh Pond, the reservoir where we had walked, “Caroline!”, then burst into tears at her mistake. The friendship must have announced its depth by its obvious affection, but also by our similarities, muted or apparent. That our life stories had wound their way toward each other on corresponding paths was part of the early connection. Finding Caroline was like placing a personal ad for an imaginary friend, then having her show up at your door funnier and better than you had conceived. Apart, we had each been frightened drunks and aspiring writers and dog lovers; together, we became a small corporation.

We had a lot of dreams, some of them silly, all part of the private code shared by people who plan to be around for the luxuries of time. One was the tatting center we thought we’d open in western Massachusetts, populated by Border collies and corgis, because we’d be too old to have dogs that were big or unruly. The Border collies would train the corgis, we declared, and the corgis would be what we fondly called the purse dogs. The tatting notion came about during one of our endless conversations about whether we were living our lives correctly—an ongoing dialogue that ranged from the serious (writing, solitude, loneliness) to the mundane (wasted time, the idiocies of urban life, trash TV). “Oh, don’t worry,” I’d said to Caroline one day when she asked if I thought she spent too much time with
Law & Order
reruns. “Just think—if we were living two hundred years ago, we’d be
playing whist, or tatting, instead of watching television, and we’d be worrying about that.” There was a long pause. “What
is
tatting?” she had asked shyly, as though the old lace-making craft were something of great importance, and so that too became part of the private lexicon—“tatting” was the code word for the time wasters we, and probably everyone else, engaged in.

These were the sort of rag-and-bone markers that came flying back to me, in a high wind of anguish, when she was dying: I remember trying to explain the tatting center to someone who knew us, then realizing how absurd it sounded, and breaking down. Of course no one would understand the tatting center; like most codes of intimacy, it resisted translation. Part of what made it funny was that it was ours alone.

ONE OF THE THINGS
we loved about rowing was its near mystical beauty—the strokes cresting across the water, the shimmering quiet of the row itself. Days after her death, I dreamed that the two of us were standing together in a dark boathouse, its only light source a line of incandescent blue sculls that hung above us like a wash of constellations. In the dream I knew she was dead, and I reached out for her and said, “But you’re coming back, right?” She smiled but shook her head; her face was a well of sadness.

EVERYTHING REALLY STARTED WITH THE DOGS
.

I had met Caroline Knapp briefly in the early 1990s, when she was a columnist for
The Boston Phoenix
and I was the book review editor at
The Boston Globe
. A collection of her columns had just been published, and someone had introduced us at a literary gathering that I was finding insufferable. “Caroline has a new book!” our hostess said brightly, certain that we each had something to offer the other. After the woman had left us, we exchanged half smiles and rolled our eyes. I’d liked that about Caroline immediately—no self-marketer here. She seemed to wear her reserve like silken armor: the French-manicured hand holding a glass of white wine, the shy, resonant voice. We passed a few polite words of mutual regard, then moved apart to make the necessary rounds.

When I saw her again, a few years later, standing near the duck pond at Fresh Pond Reservoir in Cambridge, we had both downscaled in appearance. Each of us had
young dogs, and a dog trainer we knew had recently mentioned Caroline to me. “Do you know Caroline Knapp?” Kathy had said. “She has a puppy, too. You remind me of each other—you should try to get together.”

I had mouthed some vague assent, though privately I didn’t see the resemblance. The Caroline I remembered had been way too well put together to match my presentation in those days. I had a year-old, sixty-pound Samoyed, and I was walking around with grass in my hair and freeze-dried liver in my pocket. I spent most of my time reveling in the wild pleasures of dog-raising, not much caring how I looked. But the woman I ran into at the pond that late-summer afternoon was a far cry from my memory of Caroline’s earlier refinement. She was still shy, to the point of my thinking she didn’t remember me. The veil of classy attire had been traded for sneakers and a careless braid; hovering over Lucille, her shepherd mix who was the same age as Clementine, she seemed as passionately monothematic about her dog as I was about mine.

I also knew, for reasons that were personal as well as public, that the white wine Caroline had been holding that night years before had been her magic scepter and dagger both. Public because Caroline had revealed as much in her memoir
Drinking: A Love Story
. This was the summer after the book’s publication, and she’d been on enough talk shows and feature pages to be a publisher’s dream girl. And she “showed well,” as they say in the trade: There was the long blond braid, the beautiful
voice, the restraint that suggested wells of darkness behind all that mannered poise. The general assumption is that most writers want nothing more than the kind of success Caroline’s book had just enjoyed. I had a different perspective, from experience and intuition. If writers possess a common temperament, it’s that they tend to be shy egomaniacs; publicity is the spotlight they suffer for the recognition they crave.

The personal empathy came from my comparatively cloistered past: I had stopped drinking twelve years earlier, in 1984. But whereas Caroline had gone mainstream with her addiction, I was old school and deeply private about my own struggles with alcohol. I believed the “anonymous” part of AA was there as a protective shield, and I had worn it as such for years.

We traded a tentative hello at the pond that day while the dogs introduced themselves more boisterously. “Caroline, do you remember me?” I said, and she smiled and said yes. I said, “God, you’ve been going through it lately—are you all right?” She looked surprised, then relieved. She told me later that she had been walking around that day exhausted, half undone by the exposure she was getting, and that talking to me had been a balm—I was more interested in her dog than her book sales. So was she: We were like new moms in the park, trading vital bits of information about our charges that was enthralling only to us. I mentioned a two-thousand-acre wooded reserve north of the city called Middlesex
Fells, where I was training my headstrong sled dog to run off-lead, and Caroline asked how to get there. Because the route was complicated, I explained it self-consciously, afraid that she was being polite and I was being long-winded. The place was half an hour away, tough to find even without traffic, and only someone devoted to training, as I was, would ever bother to find it.

A week later, at the Fells, I heard someone calling my name across Sheepfold Meadow, and I saw Caroline on the edge of the grounds, waving and smiling. I was surprised and pleased—she must have actually remembered my byzantine directions, then followed through. Paying attention, I would come to find out, was one of the things Caroline did. She called me a few days later to propose a walk together; when she couldn’t reach me, she called again. An introvert with a Texan’s affability, I was well intentioned but weak on follow-through; not without reason did an old friend refer to me as the gregarious hermit. I wanted the warmth of spontaneous connection and the freedom to be left alone. Caroline knocked politely on the front door of my inner space, waited, then knocked again. She was persistent, she seemed smart and warmhearted, and—to my delight—she was writing a book, she told me when we spoke, about people’s emotional connections to dogs. She seemed like someone for whom I wouldn’t mind breaking my monkish ways.

That book became
Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs
, published a couple of years later;
Caroline gave me the name of Grace, and recast Clementine as an Alaskan malamute named Oakley. Within weeks after our encounter at Sheepfold Meadow, we were planning outings every few days; the Fells became one of our regular destinations. We ran the dogs for hours in those woods outside of town, and in other woods, searching out gorgeous reserves of forests and fields all over eastern Massachusetts. We walked the beaches that autumn, and the fire trails in winter, carrying liver snaps for the dogs and graham crackers for the humans. We walked until all four of us were dumb with fatigue. The dogs would go charging through the switchbacks while Caroline and I walked and talked—over time so much and so deeply that we began referring to our afternoon-long treks as analytic walks.

“Let’s take the long way home,” she would say when we’d gotten to the car, and then we would wend our way through the day traffic of Somerville or Medford, in no hurry to separate. At the end of the drive, with Clementine snoring softly in the back seat, we would sit outside the house of whoever was being dropped off, and keep talking. Then we would go inside our respective houses and call each other on the phone.

“What about the ponds freezing?” I said one evening after a walk in early winter, when the dogs were still blasting out into the water, oblivious to anything but their own joy. “I’m worried about the ice being thin, and the dogs going out to chase birds, and falling through—
you know this happens to someone every winter. Some dog runs out onto the ice, and the owner goes after her, and the dog manages to get out and the human drowns. And you know we would both go after the dogs.”

Caroline listened to me rant—I came to realize that her listening could be so intent, it almost had a sound—and sighed before she answered. “We’re going to have to start walking with a rope and an ax, aren’t we?” she said. She always knew how to talk me down from the tree.

I suppose every friendship has such indicators—the checks and balances of the relationship that make it stronger or more generous than either of you alone. For both of us, in different ways, the volume of the world had been turned up a notch. Whether this sensitivity functioned as a failing or an asset, I think we recognized it in each other from the start. Even on that first afternoon we spent together—a four-hour walk through late-summer woods—I remember being
moved
by Caroline: It was a different response from simple affection or camaraderie. She was so quiet, so careful, and yet so fully present, and I found it a weightless liberation to be with someone whose intensity seemed to match and sometimes surpass my own. Her hesitation was what tethered her sincerity: As much as Caroline revealed in her books, she was a deeply private person who moved into relationships with great deliberation. I had known enough writers in my life, including myself, to recognize this trait: What made it to the page was never the whole story, but rather the
writer’s version of the story—a narrative with its creator in full control.

I also thought that first day, more than once, that Caroline wished she were someplace else, because she kept checking her watch—she must have looked at it, she believed covertly, a half dozen times. I would learn to live with this little ritual, which had nothing to do with me. It was a marker for Caroline’s anxiety, a way to anchor her place in the world no matter how open-ended her schedule. But that day I found it unnerving, and I finally asked her if she had to be somewhere. She was mortified, I think, and apologized, and we walked until dusk pushed us out of the woods. Monitoring the increments of time, particularly since she had stopped drinking, was Caroline’s stopgap against the free fall of the days.

And one other repeated gesture would touch me that day in a way I couldn’t have articulated at the time. Determined to keep up with Clementine, I had become a devoted dog walker; I also had had polio as a child and so walked with a slight limp and imbalance in the world. However much I compensated by toughing my way through, I was frailer on land than I liked to admit. When we went out in late September, the forest floor was covered with newly fallen acorns, and I kept slipping on them and fell more than once. I was used to my lifelong ungainliness and said so, making light of it; what I didn’t say was that I was accustomed to awkward responses. When I explained the limp by saying I’d had
polio, people tended to be either overly concerned or uncomfortable. Caroline, who never seemed to doubt my capabilities for a moment, was neither. After that first stumble, whenever I slipped she would put out an arm to brace me; holding on to her became as natural as reaching for a branch. If I was an ambler by nature and ability, Caroline was a sprinter—she was fast, she was agile, and she was often in a hurry, whether she meant to be or not. But once she ascertained my usual gait, she slowed her pace to mine and kept it there.

EXCEPT FOR THE FACT
that we had both had sisters, our childhoods had little in common. Caroline had been born a twin, appearing a few minutes after her sister, Becca, and the two had stayed close throughout their lives. Because I’d had a good friend in Texas who was a twin, I recognized in Caroline the parallel traits that seemed born of this primal dyad—she had a capacity for intimacy that could sometimes seem private and absolute. My sister was two years older than I, and I’d grown up accustomed to being both bossed around and looked after. I was the daughter of fourth-generation Texans from struggling farming families; my parents had settled in the desolate Texas Panhandle, and my dad had been a master sergeant in the Second World War. Caroline had led what she called a sheltered existence within the milieu of intellectual Cambridge. Her father, who
had died a few years before I met her, was an esteemed psychiatrist and psychoanalyst; Caroline had identified with him and adored him. She told me early in our friendship, with no small degree of amusement, that when she was a little girl of six or seven, he had sat on the end of her bed with a legal pad, pen at the ready, and asked her about her dreams. Her mother was an artist and an introvert, and she had died a year after Caroline’s father. So she had lost both parents to cancer when she was in her early thirties, a double injury that had been cataclysmic for her; she stayed drunk for another year, then drove herself to rehab in 1994.