I was eleven, but in time I’d turned my back on her, thrown my dog and her goo-oozing eyes out of bed because her gelatinous sadness was a merciless chain tying me to the person I no longer wished to be. I tried to explain all this, but I didn’t get far. It wasn’t just Penny that had been put down.
Rachel, who smoked a pipe, took the pipe out of her mouth and looked at me thoughtfully. “I’m sorry you’re sad,” she said.
* * *
It’s funny how there really are dog people and cat people. Dog people are supposed to be more outgoing and loyal; cat people are supposed to be more creative and independent. For folks committed to a binary way of looking at the world, it can be entertaining enough to think like this.
I’m a dog person, obviously enough, but I’ve owned a few cats, too, and not just Ba-boing! When I was a child we had a cat named Sneakers who lived almost exclusively on birds and mice she caught in Earle’s Woods. She’d disappear for weeks at a time, then show up at the house with a fat belly and a disturbing, satisfied expression. Then, when I was in college, I’d adopted a feral cat with big creepy thumbs for a few weeks. She proceeded to tear apart my dorm room and piss on my down coat, until finally, her work complete, she disappeared. I missed that cat after she headed out, but I got over it. I figured there was someplace else she needed to be. Cats are like that—they’re not real good about sharing their plans, which I respect.
If you want to keep a secret, tell a cat.
Parsing the differences between cat people and dog people is fun, I guess, and why not: it’s interesting to recognize our own truths reflected back at us in the behavior of animals.
But I admit I’m more interested in what becomes of dog people without dogs, or cat people without cats, or anyone who finds herself living a life in which something essential to her character is torn away from her. What happens to a husband, or a wife, whose life has been defined by the love they’ve shared, who then is suddenly alone—widowed, or separated, or abandoned for someone else? What happens to a father, or a mother, sundered from their child?
Of course, parents always lose their children, one way or another, and even if you are lucky enough to see them graduate from high school, or college, at some point they spread their wings. Then you wind up like me at age fifty-five, a mother wandering through the house looking at their fencing trophies and their old soccer balls, thinking: Who am I, now that my child is gone? Surely after all these years, I am not no one?
But I don’t know. Was I so unlike a transgender person, who never finds the courage to come out? Was I so unlike a dog person, in love with a person who does not love dogs?
* * *
Rachel and I lived in my scary apartment above the S&M dungeon for a while, then moved to the East Side, into an apartment across from a city block where they were building a giant mosque with an ornate minaret. In my mid-twenties I got a job at Viking Penguin, working as a copy editor and an assistant to the managing editor, which is really kind of curious, given the fact that I could not spell. Still, I had a job with a desk and a telephone that had little blinking lights at the bottom and a little red button marked HOLD.
Sometimes I thought about telling Rachel about the thing that was in my heart, but then I wondered what end this would serve.
I would ride the subway to the Viking Press, then located about half a block from the Flatiron Building. In one hand I held a metal lunch pail, to which I’d affixed the Viking colophon—a single-masted ship with a square sail, a dozen sailors beneath it, bearing spears and oars. Speed lines radiating from the ship indicated that it was an object of light and illumination.
Inside the lunch bucket I packed turkey sandwiches and a banana, a thermos containing chocolate milk. I had a Ring Ding Jr. Sometimes Rachel wrote a note in pen on my paper napkin: Have a nice day! I love you!
Sometimes, on my way home, I’d stop off at a bodega and buy her