lake, that it had never occurred to me even once to think of things from the porcupine’s point of view.
Zai and I had, over the years, developed a kind of system for dealing with the porcupines—or porkys, as we called them. Before Ranger could bite them, we’d sometimes go out into the yard with a large cardboard box, which we’d lower swiftly over the porcupine and trap it. We’d then slide a piece of plywood under the box, invert it, stuff the whole business into the back of the Jeep, and drive several miles away, where, with a fair amount of caution, we would release the porcupine into the wild. The porcupines would scurry out of the box and climb into a nearby tree and give Z and me a look, one that was perhaps remarkable for its complete lack of gratitude.
It put me in mind of a story Russo had once told me about a family whose car had broken down in the Arizona desert; when the man arrived with the tow truck, he opened the hood, stared into the car’s innards for a long moment, then shut the hood and declared, “I can’t help you.” When asked to explain, he went on: “I fix cars. But what you’ve got here—is a porcupine.” Apparently a porky had climbed up inside the engine while the car was parked and only now, several miles out of town, had it decided to stage its escape, puncturing hoses and fuel lines in the process. Later, as they waited for the car to be repaired, a local boy had encountered this couple’s children in a diner and asked—since it was clearly the talk of the town—“Did you hear about the porcupine people?”
The child had no recourse except to state the tragic truth. “My family—my mom and dad and me. We are the porcupine people.”
Deedie was there in Boston the next morning when Zai came out of surgery, so high from the anesthesia that she found herself gleefully singing, “Moses supposes his toeses are roses,” from Singin’ in the Rain.
“Is she okay?” I asked when Deedie called me later to give me the news.
“She’s fine,” said Deedie. “The doctor said she came through with flying colors.”
“I can’t believe she was singing,” I said.
“Yeah, well,” noted Deedie, “you sang, back in the day.”
This was true enough. They’d wheeled me into the OR sixteen years before, singing “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair.”
“So—who does she look like?” I asked her. “Now that she’s done the thing?”
“Well, she’s kind of banged up,” said Deedie.
“I know, but still—”
“She looks like herself, Jenny,” said Deedie. “Who else?”
* * *
I took the Downeaster train a few days later to be on call for the second half of Zai’s recovery, as Deedie headed back to Maine. During this stint I stayed with Zero and his wife, Jen, in their apartment in Cambridge. They owned a pug named Oscar. He was about as unlike Alex the Gordon setter as a creature could be and still be loosely considered a dog. It had been hard for me to accept Zero as a pug owner, perhaps just as hard as it had been for my friend to accept his old friend Jim as a woman.
But here we were in our sixties, Zero and me, taking a pug for a walk through Cambridge as my daughter, Zai, recovered from facial feminization surgery a few miles away. You know, the way one does.
I had asked Zero to read the chapter in this book about Alex. I was saddened to find that it had upset him, not because anything in it was untrue but because there were a lot of things in it that he wanted kept in the past. “I feel like everything I say with you,” he said, “I have to be careful, or you’re going to put it in some book. Is there no such thing as intimacy? Or privacy? I mean, what about this conversation? Is this going to wind up in some book of yours?”
“Would I do that?” I asked.
* * *
A few weeks later, Zai descended the stairs at our Maine house, wearing a bandage around her forehead. One of her eyes featured a truly impressive shiner. All in all, it looked as if my daughter had been in a very serious fistfight. And lost.
“Hey, darling,” I said to her. “You want me to make you some breakfast?”
“Yeah,” she said, sitting down on a bar stool that overlooked