Scream (25 page)

Inside it was much less space than the picture had led me to believe. It had a built-in kitchenette table and banquette seats, there were twin built-in beds, but there was only a narrow space to get around in between the built-ins. I put the dog beds on the floor but that left even less space, especially after I moved my other things in.

It was already quite full.

There was a placard of wood on which stones had been glued that spelled
ESPERANZA
. There were forks and knives and mugs and a kettle and a lot of other stuff. I was surprised there was no water and there was no electricity, since I had thought, somehow, those things would be working by the time I arrived.

My friend Sue arrived and we managed to build an enclosure for my dogs, so that they would not have to sit inside Esperanza but wouldn't wander away in the unfamiliar field. Inside the trailer it was just as hot, even with the windows open.

The next day I went to the closing of my mom's house.

When I got near the turn-off for Esperanza, I noticed a lot of cars parked on the road, at the entrance to the next driveway. I guessed the neighbors in one of the nearby houses were having some sort of Labor Day Friday barbeque.

It looked like a big gathering. I might mosey over, I thought, when I had checked on the dogs and unloaded the water I had brought from the farm. The dogs ran out to greet me at the car and I was relieved they were alive. I stopped and I got out and I started to unload the nearly empty buckets. Then I realized: How did the dogs get to the car?

Sue and I had spent the entire day building a fence to contain them. Now I did a head-count. Candy Darling, Gertrude Stein, Petunia, Tartuffe, Moushka were here . . . but Demon, Fury, and Zizou were missing.

How had they escaped? I was exhausted. I wondered . . . perhaps the missing had gone to the barbeque down the road. I tried to fix the fence and push the remaining dogs back in, dousing the overheated ones with the water. Gertrude Stein in particular looked kind of peaky. Then I headed out, shouting, “Zizou! Demon! Fury!”

There was a hedgerow separating the bottom of the dirt road from the neighbors. I heard noise on the other side. “It's her! It must be her! Hey, cut it out!” It sounded like some kind of struggle or altercation was taking place, and Demon—the larger white poodle—crashed through the bushes and came bounding to me. “Demon!” I said. I got to the road. Fury was running in circles as if he was being chased, but when he saw me he stopped and I picked him up. He weighed three pounds. Now a lot of people came running toward me. It was a lynch mob.

“YOU!” a woman shouted.

“It's her!” others yelled. “Get her!”

“Are you the owner of these dogs?”

“Yes,” I said. “My dogs escaped, I'm still looking for Zizou!”

“I have him—in a cage!” the woman said. “Do you know what happened? Do you know what you did? Your dogs escaped! They ran into Searsburg Road.
How many dogs do you have!?
They could have been killed! I stopped. I had to shut down traffic! All these cars stopped!”

She pointed to the other six vehicles. There had been more, but they were gone by now. “Luckily, I had a cage!” She pointed to a tiny box. I went over to it. The woman tried to take it from me, but I got there first. My dog Zizou exploded from the confines.

“We didn't know where these dogs came from!” a man shouted as he shuffled toward me. “They came from everywhere. We didn't know where they were coming from. Some were here and we tried to catch them but they escaped that way.” He pointed up the dirt road to the trailer.

The other people looked very angry. “Yes, we tried to catch them!” They began to stumble toward me ominously. “We have been delayed because of this event.”

“I called Animal Control!” the woman screamed.

“I'm so sorry! I just moved into the trailer. I tried to make a fence but they got out. I had to go to get water.”

Zizou was panting. “That dog has respiratory problems!” the woman said. “I know dogs. He is sick! He needs veterinary care. Animal Control is coming! These dogs could have been killed! I called the police.”

“Thank you so much,” I said again. “I'm so embarrassed. I'm terribly sorry.”

The people got back into their cars and I walked with Demon and Zizou and Fury the few hundred feet back to the trailer. It was afternoon and very hot. I yelled at the dogs for a while.

A man crashed through the brush on the far side of the field. He looked angry. There sure were a lot of people around, even though it had seemed, at first, this trailer was in the middle of nowhere. “Sorry!” I said. “If it was about my dogs escaping, I fixed the fence, I hope.”

“Are you living here now?” he said.

“Temporarily.”

“Who said you could live here?”

“The owner.”

“No. You can't stay here!” he said. “She had no right to let you stay here. You can't stay here! You do not have a septic system! I am calling the Board of Health. You have to leave.”

He disappeared back through the shrubs.

I went to the porch. I sat down for a minute on the chair I had brought. It was early evening now, but still just as hot.

A police car drove up. A cop got out.

“Hi,” I said.

“Somebody called and reported your dogs got out,” he said.

I was filled with terror. I was overtired and dehydrated. I started to cry. “Are you Animal Control?”

“No, I'm the police. I don't know if Animal Control is also coming.”

“Will I be arrested?” I said.

“What?” he said. “Do your dogs have licenses?”

“What?” I said. “No. Am I going to get a ticket? I'm going to jail?”

I couldn't stop crying. I tried to calm down. In prison I would have running water. I could shower. Even my dogs would be better off. When Animal Control came, they would be taken to a kennel, or to the pound.

What was I doing here in this trailer? Why was I here? I had spent years moving my mom from nursing home to nursing home, driving miles to visit her. I had spent years cleaning out her house, getting her things packed, trying to stop her house from falling down. I was totally alone. “Take me,” I said to the officer, and I put out my hands to be cuffed.

“I don't know why they called the police,” the cop said at last, and he left.

I was hungry and hot and sticky and I hadn't obtained any provisions for myself, but I fed my dogs and we all piled into the trailer and I shut and locked the door. It was too hot, really, to sleep with the door shut, but by now I was awfully jittery.

In the morning the owner called my cell phone. “How's it going?” she said.

“There's no electricity. There's no water. There's no propane. I am in a tin can with my dogs and nothing works.”

“I'll send help,” she said. After a few hours a truck turned onto the dirt road and a man got out. “I'm a friend of Anne's,” he said. “She said you needed help.”

The man was very angry. “It's Saturday,” he said. “It's Labor Day.”

He fiddled with the equipment for a long time. “Even if the electricity was working, the pipes in this thing are ancient!” he said. “There is no way to get the water running through them.”

He tried to get the propane to work. He poked and prodded and he flipped a switch and there was a crackling noise and then a loud boom. “Get back!” he yelled. A big cloud of black smoke started pouring out. “Get out now! It's not safe!”

I grabbed a few things and I put my dogs in the car and drove to my friend Sue's basement in Ithaca.

It wasn't really a basement; it had sliding doors to the outside. It was a normal house. There was water, and a washing machine and dryer. In the evenings I would go upstairs. I cooked vegan food for Sue. Kristine, Sue's wife, was vegetarian, so she liked the food, too. Sometimes I would watch TV with them. My dogs only escaped once or twice, at the beginning, then the neighbors appeared, but they were not irate or enraged the way they had been in the neighborhood of the trailer. I sat in bed every night with my poodles. I never knew before that how happy I could be.

I'm sitting on the couch upstairs in Sue and Kristine's house when the contractor stops over one night to see me. He pulls up the drive, he's dressed in his work boots and tight jeans and hoodie, and the four of us are hanging out, when Devin, their daughter, comes in. She's just arrived home from Maryland for a couple of days. She stops in the doorway for half a second, startled. I keep thinking of that movie
La Cage aux Folles,
only this is the opposite?

Here she grew up in this normal home with two vegetarian moms and a younger brother, gets back from college for a few days, and a middle-aged woman has moved into the basement with eight poodles and her parents are entertaining a tattooed, mustached Kool-smoking guy with a big truck parked in front of the house. Then she takes off her shoes and sits as if it's all perfectly usual. Now the scene was pretty much like a face-off: the Indigo Girls versus Ted Nugent.

A few weeks went by and I was telling someone about Esperanza, and how that trailer blew up when the man tried to turn on the electricity and how my eight poodles escaped and the police came. And there was something very familiar about this story, not just because I had told it a number of times. I was uneasy suddenly.

Then I remembered: some years before I had written a book,
By the Shores of Gitchee Gumee
. In this book, the family lived in a trailer with eight dogs and the dogs escaped and the police came and then the whole trailer blew up due to a propane tank incident.

There were a few differences between what had happened to me and the family in this book I had written so many years previously. For example, the family owned eight Mexican hairless dogs (xoloitzcuintlis),
not
poodles. And the family consisted of a mother and five kids—each by a different father. Then the mother ran off and ended up living with another woman in California as a lesbian. And when the trailer in the book blew up, it slipped down the hill and into the lake below.

Esperanza, the trailer, was in a flat field, although it's true Cayuga Lake was only a short distance away.

Still, there were plenty of similarities. But I had forgotten all about it, pretty much, even though they had—a few years before—made this book into a film.

It was a really big production, a major picture, and it was in Russian.

Part of the movie was filmed in Crimea, on the Black Sea. So they flew me over to see the shoot. I took Willow, who was about eight at the time, and my mom.

We flew to Kiev, then we had to change airports, I think, and then fly to Crimea, and then get to the odd, remote hotel in the dead of night and wake up the manager to take us to a room.

A driver from the movie crew took us in a van the next day three or four hours to the location. There, we were given a cottage. We wandered down to the set. On the beach, they had blown up the trailer the day before.

Actually, it wasn't really a trailer. The book had been altered to star Russian actors, and the Russians didn't live in trailers. They had built—for the film—a beach house on stilts and blown that up. It was in the book: the little boy had turned on the propane stove and it blew the place up.

We missed the big explosion scene by one day; the set was just a huge heap of rubble on a beach on the Black Sea. I was wearing a big beach hat and my mother was wrapped in some kind of blanket because she was cold, and Willow had on her own costume, a giant flared skirt from Chile, I think, or whatever else she had deemed suitable, since I would never argue with anyone about his or her choice of clothing.

We stood looking at the disaster zone for a minute, and everyone on the shoot—the cameramen, the director of photography, the lighting people, the sound guys, the hair and makeup artists, the actors—stopped to stare.

Finally someone came over. “Excuse me,” she said in Russian. “Can I help you?” Of course I didn't know what she was saying, but she got someone over who spoke English. It turned out, I was later told, that when the three of us arrived on the beach, the whole crew had just quit what they were doing to stare because, as one person said, “Who the hell are those people? They look like materialized characters out of the film!”

After they figured out who we were, though, they were friendly. My mom started muttering. “Oh, there's a Chinese crested! It's Lily.”

I looked around. There was no Chinese crested dog, let alone my mom's deceased Chinese crested, who was named Lily. “No, Ma,” I said. “Are you okay? There's no way you would find a Chinese crested in Crimea.”

I just didn't know what to do. Was this a sign that my mother was developing dementia? It had been a struggle, getting her on the campus-to-campus bus from Ithaca and then to Brooklyn on the subway and then to Crimea, but that was because her legs hurt. Maybe the trip had been too much for her?

They were filming this dude—he looked kind of like Joe Dallesandro from an Andy Warhol/Paul Morrissey film—as he came out from under a broken wreck of a car on one of those dollies the mechanics lie on. He had a big spliff in his mouth.

It was a really great scene, I had always loved Andy Warhol's films and I was just so happy that they were making a film like this.

I had totally forgotten, it was in my book.

Then they shot another scene. They brought out a Chinese crested dog. It looked just like my mom's dog, Lily. Only it was named Lula. They took this dog and they put it on a couch that was floating in the Black Sea. Then the actor who looked kind of like Joe Dallesandro dove into the water and rescued that dog from the sofa. That was the dog my mother had seen earlier, which was whisked off the set, leading to my idea she had dementia.

Do you see why I am so confused? In my book—which I had forgotten—one of the family's xoloitzcuintlis had gotten tossed into the water in the explosion and one of the boys in the family, who looked like Joe Dallesandro, who wanted to be an actor, dove into the lake to rescue it.