Still Life with Bread Crumbs (8 page)

It made sense that the woman who lived there thought he was her dog, given her mental state; it made sense that he was agnostic about the whole thing, given his history. Maybe he was home, maybe not. It would depend on how inconsistent meals became, how often he got kicked, whether the door was locked on too many cold nights, or whether he got to curl up on one corner of the couch, the one with a pillow that smelled of coconut oil and perspiration. He didn’t ask much because he’d been accustomed to getting very little, and he’d learned not to commit until he was clear on the conditions. Which was why he’d followed a series of faint scents—warm human, toasted bread, ripe cheese, bird droppings, deer droppings, bear droppings—up the hill to the cottage. It happened that his nose was several thousand times sharper than that of a human, which had made living downwind of a meth kitchen torture even before the cold came. He could pick up the faint lingering aroma of the long-dead raccoon and even a hint of gun residue that made him skittish. The
smell that calmed him but that he couldn’t name was the smell of warm peaches in a bowl on the table mingled with a leftover scone.

Rebecca would have told you she was not a dog person, although if she had told that to anyone in town, except for the city couples who came only on weekends, they would not have known what she meant. Having a dog in the country didn’t require much of an investment, financial or emotional: a clothesline, a twenty-pound bag of no-name food, a doghouse elevated enough so that not too much snow got inside. The locals were pragmatic about their animals in a way the city people found callous. Some couple from Tribeca would be sitting in the animal clinic waiting room with a feral cat they intended to take home after it was dewormed, declawed, vaccinated, and neutered—after it was purged of much of its essential catness—and the vet tech would come out and say to the man slumped across from them, zipping and unzipping an old waxed jacket, “Mr. Jensen, Rufus broke that leg in two places and it’s going to be upwards of six hundred dollars to fix it.” And Mr. Jensen would turn his wool cap in his hands and think about the gutters, the gas prices, and the lack of seasonal work and say sadly, “I guess you’ll just have to put him down.” Some of the country people took the dog home and put him down themselves, coming up behind with a .22. It was cheaper than the injection. Then they went to the shelter and got another dog. Often they gave it the same name as the old one, just to make things simpler.

It was different in the city, which was why Rebecca didn’t think of herself as a dog person. Growing up in a building with lots of older people, she had known two sorts of women: the ones whose faces folded in upon themselves at the sight of a dog, particularly in the lobby, who fought to have dogs consigned to the service elevator, who pressed into a corner or wouldn’t get onto the elevator with one, particularly those Alsatians, terrifying. And then there were the ones who had dogs and were,
frankly, nuts. They dressed their dogs in plaid coats, talked to them in high-pitched baby talk, referred to themselves as Ginger’s or Poppy’s mommy. The woman in the apartment next to her parents had a line of brass urns on the living room mantel, each containing the ashes of a Pekingese. After she died and her children emptied the apartment they were still there and the super put them in a box and then in the dumpster.

Even when Rebecca had a son, who in the manner of children the world over asked for a pet incessantly,
I’ll take care of it, I will, please please please
, circumstances dictated that Rebecca would not have a dog because Peter was allergic. When she visited England the first time with him she realized that this was so aberrational there as to be shameful, and that Peter’s father had dealt with it by always having a pair of buff-colored Labradors and telling his son that he simply needed to get on with it. In this way Peter had gotten the nickname Wheezy at school; this, too, she discovered on that trip, when virtually all his old friends called him by that name. It made her look at him in a different way and be very solicitous for a time, until finally on the train back to London he had said, “Is there any particular reason you’ve chosen this moment to behave as though I am terminally ill?” Kindness only made Peter harsh.

Of course by the time Ben was six Peter was off to the next woman, the new family, but somehow the dog issue had soon vanished for her son, replaced by demands for video games and computer equipment. On a bitter winter morning Rebecca was happy to sit at the table with a cup of coffee and the newspapers and not have to gird herself with boots and scarves to pull a recalcitrant terrier along the curb and remove her gloves to stoop and pick up after him with a plastic bag.

No one had ever picked up after this dog. It could be argued that it was the other way around, that he cleaned up the messes of people, that when the old man spilled milk down the sides of the kitchen cabinets or dropped cereal on the floor, or when the
woman in the white house let the garbage get away from her and slide from the can, he had cleaned up after them. His were transactional relationships; he gave as good as he got, maybe better. Maybe much better. It had been a bad couple of weeks in the little white house, and his haunches jutted sharply from the sandy fur above his tail, his midsection a big concave bowl when he preferred it with a little heft.

“Jack!” a voice called from below, and the dog’s ears rose into sharp triangles. “Jack, come. Come.” That’s what he was called, at least for now. He took his time going down a deer trail, raising his leg against a spindly pine where a fox had done the same thing the day before. He raised his nose to the sky, thought he smelled an open can of cat food. This one bought cat food as often as she bought dog food, but he didn’t care as long as there was food, and the heat in the house worked.

In a way it was too bad that he’d vanished by the time Rebecca pulled her car into the gravel place to one side of the cottage. She could have used the distraction. “I will see you again soon,” she had said to the attendant at the nursing home, and “I hope so,” the woman had replied, but they both knew it wasn’t true. Rebecca had noticed that her intention to visit her parents was in direct proportion to her distance from them in both time and space. The pink of her mother’s scalp through the flossy white hair, the box of adult diapers in her father’s bathroom. And the fear that someday she herself would be slumped in a plastic chair, lifting a calculator or an old cellphone to her face, an imaginary camera.

“She thinks she’s a photographer, that one,” an aide would say, calling her honey or dear or sweetheart that way they did that was supposed to be nice but wasn’t. Or maybe if she was very lucky, one of them would say, “Somebody told me she used to be a famous photographer.” There was a Filipino woman who did occupational therapy at the Jewish Home and whom she’d heard whispering about her mother, “Very famous concert
pianist.” She wanted to tell her not to whisper. Bebe would be thrilled if such a remark penetrated her conscious mind.

Rebecca got out of the car with the peculiar empty feeling that she often had instead of sadness, as though her body knew that it was better to feel nothing at all rather than the something her mother’s playing and her father’s jollity and her fading bank balance evoked. She was ashamed, too, because all she could think of was having a long shower standing in the stained tub, washing off the smell she always felt crept into her clothes and her hair during these trips, the sweetish smell of old people, a combination of clothes that needed washing and some attar of starchy food and medicinal ointments. In the nursing home it was overlaid with the smell of disinfectant and it was almost blotted out in her father’s apartment by Sonya’s sponge baths—the specifics of which she didn’t like to think about too much—and one of those laundry detergents with a name like Mountain Spring or Autumn Rain. But the smell was still there and she could smell it long after she’d left. With her foot on the gas she felt she was trying to outrun it, and her parents, and her fears for her future—what would happen to them, what would happen to her. She vowed to return only when she could return properly, to her own apartment and a more permanent work arrangement, whatever that might be. At night she found herself imagining managing a coffee shop, raising money for a hospital, anything with a regular paycheck. An office. She had never worked in a real office.

By the time she arrived back at the house—she still didn’t call it home—she was like a wine bottle with nothing inside but a few grainy dregs, a woman who rarely wept although she knew she would have been better for it. The dog might have cheered her, or at least taken her mind off her father, her mother, the money. But perhaps she wouldn’t have noticed him properly, not tired and depleted as she was that evening. Perhaps she wouldn’t have noticed the way his black eyes shone from beneath his caterpillar
brows, the way his ears lifted when a deer sneezed somewhere out in the forest. Who knows how it all would have turned out if the dog hadn’t heard the cry from down below and answered it, hoping for food? Sometimes things have to come when you’re ready for them. Rebecca Winter knew that well, was about to learn it even better.

One morning in September, just like that, there was an additional $380 in her account. It must have come from a permission to reprint one of her photographs, perhaps the combined royalties on the two books. It was an amount that would have seemed negligible years before but now felt like a windfall. It was a warm day, with a faint breeze, and suddenly everything seemed promising. She would spend some of the money at the grocery store, then make soup and stockpile it in the narrow freezer, narrowed further by the crusty ice on its walls. Maybe she would even defrost the freezer while she was making the soup.

“That’s Tad,” Sarah whispered as she put a pumpkin scone in front of her at Tea for Two. “He’s a clown.”

“I can see that,” Rebecca said.

“No, like a real clown. A professional.”

“I can see that.”

Big black shoes with curling toes, a one-piece suit part polka dots, part stripes and stars. A curly red wig, ersatz Orphan Annie, with a hint of dark hair at the nape of the neck. And the obligatory white face paint and scarlet nose. Tad looked as though he was ready for work.

“May I have six scones, Sarah?” he said. “Assorted?”

“Anything to drink?”

“No, thanks. Make it a dozen scones. Or, no, what about six scones, two black-and-white cookies, and two walnut Danish?”

“I’m out of Danish.”

“What about six scones, the black-and-white cookies, and some croissants?”

Rebecca looked down at her computer screen, studying the cross photographs, trophy, yearbook, ribbon, birthday card. There were commonplace customs detailed in the local paper that she found strange and inexplicable: seasonal corn mazes, decorated stroller parades, clog dancing. In the beginning she had tried to convince herself that the crosses were a local tradition of some sort, but she couldn’t imagine what sort that might be. Perhaps if she saw Jim Bates she would ask him. Sarah said he knew everything.

“Oh, maybe I’ll have a hot chocolate, too,” the clown said. “But no whipped cream. Or just a tad.”

“A tad,” Sarah said. “Ha ha. I get it.”

Rebecca tried not to look at Tad, which was difficult. It was like ignoring panhandlers on the subway: a clown commanded the eye. She had once been hired by a magazine to take pictures for a story on the vanishing circus. She had not been particularly happy with the results—too obvious, especially the acrobats in their spangled costumes and the clowns in their extravagant makeup, all dour and vacant-faced in repose. There had been some close-ups of the elephant’s eyes that she had thought were good, but of course the magazine had not used them. “They’re
a little much for a general audience,” the art director had said, begging the question of why they had hired her to take them. Perhaps for the cover line: “Rebecca Winter Goes to the Circus.” That was during her heyday.

She opened an email from TG: “Don’t get it.” It was her response to the photographs of the stone wall. She had nevertheless had some interest from the Greifers, the couple in Colorado Springs who had the largest private collection of Winter photographs. Sylvia Greifer had given the original print of
Still Life with Bread Crumbs
to Wellesley, where she had gone to college. It hung in the front foyer of the administration building, with a copper plaque. The students had started an a cappella group called the Bread Crumbs that sang only songs that had been performed or written by women. There was a lot of Joni Mitchell.

If the Greifers bought just one of the photographs Rebecca would be safe for a while. She thought of the Mary Cassatt hanging in the hallway of Sonya’s apartment. Ben had dated an associate at Sotheby’s last year who estimated, sight unseen, that it was worth at least $100,000. “Shouldn’t somebody take a look at it?” Ben had asked.

“It’s not my concern, or yours,” she’d said, although she’d often wondered the same thing. “The painting belongs to your grandmother.”

“I could use a little cash,” Ben had said. He had no idea that the same was true of his mother. It was not useful for children to know about their parents’ money worries, although Rebecca would have found it useful to know that her own parents were going broke some years before they finally, stupendously, had. Her mother had been barely cogent when she’d signed the papers to sell the apartment where she’d once lived with her own parents and which her father had deeded to her and her husband. “You never had a head for business,” she’d muttered as she left the room. “She’s right, as always,” Rebecca’s father said, his head and shoulders down so low, his face so pink with chagrin,
he looked like a boiled shrimp curved into the carved chair at the head of the dining table.

TG’s new assistant—there was a new assistant every few months, the old one driven away in tears—forwarded an email from Carnegie Mellon about a visiting professorship the following fall. A semester in Pittsburgh, with a house provided and an honorarium she once would have thought insufficient but which now seemed eminently possible. She wrote to the program director to ask for more specifics.