Pug Hill (33 page)

“First,” my dad explains, handing me Betsy’s harness, “we take a walk twice around the block with Betsy and Annabelle.”

“What about Captain?” I ask over what has so quickly escalated on Betsy’s part to screeching, over the sounds of Annabelle’s barking which is much softer, much easier to talk over, and sounds very much like a muffled, “Whoa, whoa, whoa.”

“Ah, Captain.” Dad looks over at Captain, who seems to know he’s not coming, seems quite resigned to that fact, and is resting peacefully in his dog bed. “No, Captain can’t make the walk; Captain just comes for the beach part,” he explains, and I wonder how many parts actually constitute the routine, and then we both focus completely on harnessing Betsy and Annabelle, not an easy task when Betsy is well, Betsy, and Annabelle, this morning at least, seems to find the hysteria contagious.

“Annabelle,” Dad begins, as we turn right out of the driveway, walking out onto the quiet street, “she just sits down on the grass as soon as we get to the beach. She doesn’t get any exercise, so we do this for her, we take a walk twice around the block each morning.”

“I see,” I say, as Betsy marches very seriously right next to my feet, very much like the trained dog she is not, and Annabelle sits down.

“Or we drag,” Dad explains, pulling gently on Annabelle’s leash. Annabelle, indeed, does not seem to be such a fan of exercise, and any chance she can get, she sits down, digs right into the cement of the road. She seems to be just slightly more inclined once we coax her.

“Ann-a-belle! Ann-a-belle!” Dad says enthusiastically.

“Ann-a-belle! Ann-a-belle!” I say, too. Betsy starts barking.

“You are my best friend,” we both say to her, at exactly the same time.

“Does Betsy still walk at the beach?” I ask, once Betsy has settled down, and Annabelle has reluctantly gotten up again and we are walking again, in something that marginally represents a forward motion.

“Oh, Betsy loves the beach. She just loves it. I let her off her leash down there and she runs and runs. She just comes on the walk with Annabelle, because, well, it’s a little easier than leaving her at home.” He laughs then, and tugs gently once more on Annabelle’s leash. We walk on, stopping occasionally for Betsy or Annabelle to sniff something, and I think how my dad does this every morning, and how probably not that many people would.

After two laps, I stand waiting in the driveway with Betsy and Annabelle. Betsy is barking and running back and forth across the entrance to the driveway, and Annabelle is panting, lying on the cement. Dad emerges from the house a few minutes later, with Captain, also in his harness, walking lopsidedly alongside him. At the sight of him, Betsy starts to screech, and Annabelle sits up slightly and utters one soft, “Whoa.” We pick up each of the dogs, and put them down in the back of the Jeep, onto the green plaid blankets that are always there, always laid out across the seats. The Jeep, my dad will tell you, it’s really the dogs’ car, they just let him drive it.

The dogs all sit remarkably quietly, all three in a row, all seemingly very patient and not grousing at all with each other. I look at them back there and really, they do look happy, at least to me they do. We head out of the driveway, and drive the half-mile down the hill, to the beach, because even though it’s so close, Captain can no longer walk it.

There’s a big grass field to the side of the beach, and this is where we pull up with the car.

“All right, guys,” Dad says to them after we’ve lifted them all down from the car and off Betsy goes, running across the field like a whippet, just as graceful, just as free. Captain galumphs after her, and I watch him as he goes. I try not to think how he used to run across this field, just like a slightly stockier version of a whippet himself, when we were all younger. Annabelle sits down and leans herself, lumpen, against the front tire of the Jeep. Dad picks her up and she reaches up to his face, all long slimy pink tongue, and licks him. “No, no, Annabelle, you don’t have to kiss,” he tells her, and we all walk together, Dad carrying Annabelle like a football, out to the center of the field.

I keep my eyes on Captain, gimping across the field, off-balance because of his goiter. And I know it’s not really a goiter, I know it’s something so much worse than that; I know that it is really a malignant sarcoma. But I prefer to call it the goiter because even though I imagine there is nothing funny about goiters per se, especially, I’m sure, if let’s say, you happen to have a goiter, I think it doesn’t sound as bad. It’s easier this way; easier when you think of the malignant sarcoma as a goiter, to believe what the vet says when he says Captain is not in any pain.

“Do you think we’re a dysfunctional family?” My dad asks me, breaking the silence.

“I’m sorry?” I say, startled not so much by the breaking of the silence, as by the peculiarity of the question. Dad’s never struck me before as being the type of person to bandy about psychological words like
dysfunctional.
But then I remember that Dad now knows how to Google.

“Dysfunctional. Do you think we’re a dysfunctional family? I read that people who join communes tend to come from dysfunctional families.”

“Um, I’ve never really thought about it before,” I say and look out, across the field, at the water. To tell you the truth, I never really have. And I know that might sound absolutely insane, that someone who spends as much time thinking about so many things as I tend to do, that someone who’s part of a family that spends as much time as we all do talking about a commune, has never once thought of her family and felt the desire to use the word
dysfunctional.

Though, I must admit, I have had my moments in which I might have come close. I have sometimes asked myself why it seems that everyone has a sister who is just their very best friend, that everyone has a mother who tells them how beautiful they are four hundred times a day, but I don’t. I wonder if that’s sort of the McNeill family way of thinking we are dysfunctional.

“Look over there, Hope, look at the rabbit running across the field,” Dad says. I watch as a rabbit disappears from view, and Betsy charges after it. I wonder if the things I think sometimes when I think about my family are simply the “look over there, Hope, look at the rabbit running across the field,” way of thinking we are dysfunctional.

“Betsy! Come back here!” Dad calls out to her. She doesn’t listen. I look over at my dad; he’s such a great dad. I think of what a good father he’s been, what a nice childhood he gave us. I don’t think he could have done anything better, I really don’t.

“No, Dad,” I say, “I don’t think we’re a dysfunctional family,” and we both watch as Betsy comes back up over the dune.

“And Dad?”

“Yes, sweetheart?”

“I don’t think Darcy’s going to join a commune. I really don’t.”

He looks over and smiles at me. “That’s good to know, sweetheart.”

Captain is walking up closer to us now. I can see his eyes better now, and his expression, the jauntiness to his step, which seems in this moment to be only slightly lopsided. As I watch him approach in a way that is so clearly as joyful as it is labored, I feel like I don’t need language for it anymore. I don’t need to switch up words and change them around, substituting ones that are funnier, less scary, in order to be able to believe he’s not in any pain, or at least not too much. All I have to do to be able to believe that is all I’ve ever had to do to believe in things or make sense of a lot of things. All I have to do is just look into a dog’s eyes. The eyes of a Saint Bernard, an English mastiff, a shar-pei, a Jack Russell terrier, a French bulldog, a corgi, a pug. A lot of the time I think all you have to do is look into any dog’s eyes, and there’ll you’ll find honesty; there, I think so much of the time, you’ll find the truth.

Captain’s journey across the field has, at last, come to an end. He sits at my father’s feet and looks up at him with so much happiness, his eyes so filled with love. And I know there are those people, those people who will tell you that dogs don’t have our kind of emotions, don’t share what we call feelings, and all I can say about those people, even if you happen to be one of them, is that really, they are insane.

Dad gives Captain one of his special sugar-free bones and Captain plods a few feet away from us to enjoy his bone in what I can only guess he has decided is a bit more privacy. Captain looks back over at us as he chews his bone, throwing his head back in the air.

Half an hour later, we load all the dogs back into the car, and head back up the hill, where we’ll finish the routine, the part of the routine I’m familiar with because Mom wrote it all down, and made charts and lists to follow. She did everything except make a PowerPoint presentation entitled “How to Feed the Dogs and Give Captain His Medicine.”

Once we’re home again, we’ll get out the three different kibbles, the special diabetic kibble for Captain, the regular kind for Betsy, and the RD (restricted diet) for Annabelle. We’ll give Betsy some of the Lil’ Cesar’s that she loves so much, and we’ll give a half of a slice of fat-free American cheese to Annabelle. Captain will get a fried egg, and his cream cheese packets with his different medicines, and his eye drops, and once he’s done eating, his insulin shot.

They say that girls grow up and they marry men who are just like their fathers. And my question to “them” is this: how do you find someone who does things like this? How do you find someone who gets up early in the morning to drag his obese, sedentary dog twice around the block? How do you find someone who lets his neurotic, jealousy-ridden dog come, too, so that she doesn’t get yet another complex from being left at home? How do you find someone who will then load three dogs into the car so that the oldest dog, the one so literally on his last legs, can enjoy just a few more hours spent on the field he loves, right next to the beach? Really,
how?

I turn around in my seat for a moment and I look at the dogs. Captain is rocking back and forth in his seat, happily tossing his head.

“Henry, Henry man, you gotta listen to me,” C.P. says urgently, leaning across the breakfast table. I wonder why it does not occur to C.P. that the chances of Dad listening to him would increase tenfold if he could refrain from calling Dad, “man.”

Mom and Darcy returned last night from Canyon Ranch, both looking more rested and svelte and golden than they generally already do. Mom arranged it so that they were able to pick up C.P. at the airport on their way home. She believed that if C.P. arrived here first, and was here with just me and Dad, without Darcy as a buffer, that, as she explained to me before she left, “Your father may very well kill C.P.” The way Dad is looking at C.P. right about now, I have to concede that Mom, as she so often does, may have a point.

Dad doesn’t say anything. He angles his chin in toward his neck and looks up over his glasses. The carton of milk that is the focus of C.P.’s attention and near-revolutionary zeal is still in Dad’s hand, poised over his bowl of cereal.

“Do you have any idea what they do to dairy cows? Do you? It’s horrible, man, it’s so inhumane.” I watch Dad’s face get redder, see the cardboard on the milk carton compress slightly under the weight of his grip. “For one thing—”

“C.P., honey sweetie,” Darcy cuts in, leaning over in her chair to rub C.P.’s newly shaved head. “Let’s let Daddy enjoy his cereal. We don’t need to talk about dairy cows right now.” C.P. looks over at Darcy, as if it were really she who got up there and hung the moon. “You know what?” she coos to him. “Why don’t we go for a walk? I want to show you the beach.”

“Okay, honey sweetie,” he says, forgetting for now about the plight of the dairy cow. Darcy jumps up from her chair and reaches for C.P.’s hand. As C.P. pushes his chair away from the table, Darcy bounces back and forth happily from one foot to the other. She is the bounciest, bubbliest thirty-four-year-old to ever walk the face of the earth, I’m sure of it.

As C.P. stands, all eyes are on him. He puts his hands in prayer position right in front of his chest, his elbows sticking straight out at ninety-degree angles. He closes his eyes, bows his head for a moment.

“Please, enjoy your meal,” he says and turns and walks out of the kitchen. Darcy hops along behind him.

You can see and hear and feel my mom and I exhale. Dad pours the offending milk onto his cereal, puts the carton down with just slightly more force than usual and turns to his paper. Mom shakes her head back and forth a few times, pushes her own chair back and leaves the room.

I sit for a few minutes with Dad, but it’s pretty clear that right now he probably doesn’t want to talk. I think of Mom, how she looked upset right before she left the kitchen. I don’t want her to be upset on the day of her party, this party that she and Dad, and just about the whole world, have been looking forward to for so long. I put my coffee cup in the dishwasher silently and head off to find her.

I find Mom upstairs, in my parents’ room. She’s standing by the window, looking down at the large, round, skirted table in front of it. I’ve always liked this table: the dog table. On this table, Mom has only pictures of the dogs. Silver picture frames, in all shapes and sizes, display so many photographs of all the dogs, individually, in various groupings and pairings, engaged in different activities, over the courses of each of their lives.

I walk over to Mom and look down at the dog table, too. There they all are. There’s Morgan outside by a pond; Brentwood in a snow-covered field; Spanky, my Spanky, next to a peony bush; Boswell next to a Christmas tree; Captain and Annabelle at the beach; Betsy at a café in the south of France. So many moments of their lives, displayed here are the most joyous ones.

I notice that Mom has another picture of Boswell in her hand. This one is in a round frame; it shows Boswell in profile, from the shoulders up. Mom looks up at me then, and her eyes are filled with something. I am so sure it is regret. Crazily, I am so sure that what she is going to say next is that she regrets that sometimes, a lot of the time, I never got any attention because it was always Darcy, always,
always
Darcy, who needed so much more. I am so certain that is what she is going to say next, that I wonder if I am actually psychic.