TOGETHER WITH CARL I used to dream of changing the power structure and making the world a better place. Never that I could end up watching the ten o’clock news with a small rodent on my lap.
He was the fourth. Percy, the first, was a bullet-shaped, dark brown guinea pig, short-haired as distinct from the longhaired kind, and from the moment he arrived he tried to hide, making tunnels out of the newspapers in his cage until Martine, who was just eight then, cut the narrow ends off a shoebox and made him a real tunnel, where he stayed except when food appeared. I guess she would have preferred a more sociable pet, but Carl and I couldn’t walk a dog four times a day, and the cat we tried chewed at the plants and watched us in bed, which made us self-conscious, and finally got locked in the refrigerator as the magnetic door was closing, so after we found it chilled and traumatized we gave it to a friend who appreciated cats.
Percy had been living his hermit life for about a year when Martine noticed he was hardly eating and being unusually quiet, no rustling of paper in the tunnel. I made an appointment with a vet someone recommended. On the morning of the appointment, after I got Martine on the school bus, I saw Percy lying very still outside the tunnel. I called the vet before I left for work to say I thought his patient might be dead.
“Might be?”
“Well ... how can I tell for sure?”
He clears his throat and with this patronizing air doctors have, even vets, says, “Why not go and flick your finger near the animal’s neck and see if he responds?”
Since I work for a doctor I’m not intimidated by this attitude, it just rolls off me. “Okay, hold on a minute. ... I went and flicked. “He doesn’t seem to respond, but still ... I just don’t feel sure.”
“Raise one of his legs,” he says slowly, as if he’s talking to a severely retarded person, “wiggle it around and see if it feels stiff.” He never heard of denial, this guy. What am I going to tell Martine?
“Hang on. ...” I wiggled the leg. “It feels stiff,” I had to admit.
“I think it’s safe to assume,” he says, “that the animal is dead.”
“I guess we won’t be keeping the appointment, then?” I’m not retarded. I said it on purpose, to kind of rile him and see what he’d say.
“That will hardly be necessary.”
To get ready for the burial, I put Percy in a shoebox (a new one, not the tunnel one), wrapped the tissue paper from the shoes around him, and added some flowers I bought on the way home from work, then sealed it up with masking tape. Carl and I kept the coffin in our room that night so Martine wouldn’t have to be alone in the dark with it. She didn’t cry much, at least in front of us. She keeps her feelings to herself, more like me in that way than Carl. But I knew she was very attached to Percy, hermit that he was. The next morning, a Saturday, the three of us set out carrying the box and a spade and shovel we borrowed from the super of the building. Carl’s plan was to bury him in the park, but it was the dead of winter, February, and the ground was so frozen the spade could barely break it.
“This isn’t going to work,” he said.
Martine looked tragic. She’s always been a very beautiful child, with a creamy-skinned face and an expression of serene tragic beauty that, depending on the situation, can make you want to laugh or cry. At that moment I could have done either. We were huddled together, our eyes and noses running from the cold, Martine clutching the shoebox in her blue down mittens.
“I know what,” Carl said. “Well bury him at sea.”
Martine’s face got even more tragic, and I gave him a funny look too. What sea? It was more than an hour’s drive to Coney Island and I had a million things to do that day.
“The river. It’s a very old and dignified tradition,” he told her. “For people who die on ships, when it would take too long to reach land. In a way it’s nicer than an earth burial—in the course of time Percy’s body will drift to the depths and mingle with coral and anemone instead of being confined in—”
“Okay,” she said.
So we walked up to the 125th Street pier on the Hudson River. This is a desolate place just off an exit of the West Side Highway, where the only buildings are meat-processing plants and where in the daytime a few lone people come to wash their cars, hauling water up in buckets, and even to fish, believe it or not, and at night people come to buy and sell drugs. I looked at Martine. She handed me the box like she couldn’t bear to do it herself, so I knelt down and placed it in the river as gently as I could. I was hoping it would float for a while, at least till we could get her away, but my romantic Carl was saying something poetic and sentimental about death and it began to sink, about four feet from where we stood. It was headed south, though, towards the Statue of Liberty and the open sea, I pointed out to her. Free at last.
We got her another guinea pig, a chubby buff-colored one who did not hide and was intelligent and interested in its surroundings, as much as a guinea pig can be. We must have had it—Mooney, it was called—for around a year and a half when Carl began talking about changing his life, finding a new direction. He was one of those people—we both were—who had dropped out of school because it seemed there was so much we should be doing in the world. I was afraid he would be drafted, and we had long searching talks, the way you do when you’re twenty, about whether he should be a conscientious objector, but at the last minute the army didn’t want him because he had flat feet and was partially deaf in one ear. Those same flat feet led all those marches and demonstrations. Anyhow, he never managed to drop back in later on when things changed. Not that there was any less to do, but somehow no way of doing it anymore and hardly anyone left to do it with, not to mention money. You have to take care of your own life, we discovered. And if you have a kid ... You find yourself doing things you never planned on.
He started driving a cab when Martine was born and had been ever since. It’s exhausting, driving a cab. He spent less and less time organizing demonstrations and drawing maps of the locations of nuclear stockpiles. Now he spent his spare time playing ball with the guys he used to go to meetings with, or reading, or puttering with his plants, which after me, he used to say, were his great passion. It was not a terrible life, he was not harming anyone, and as I often told him, driving a cab where you come in contact with people who are going places was more varied than what I do all day as an X-ray technician, which you could hardly call upbeat. Most of the time, you find the patients either have cancer or not, and while you naturally hope for the best each time, you can’t help getting to feel less and less, because a certain percentage are always doomed regardless of your feelings. Well, Carl was not satisfied, he was bored, so I said, “Okay, what would you do if you had a totally free choice?”
“I would like to practice the art of topiary.”
“What’s that?”
“Topiary is the shaping of shrubberies and trees into certain forms. You know, when you drive past rich towns in Westchester, you sometimes see bushes on the lawns trimmed to spell a word or the initials of a corporation? You can make all sorts of shapes—animals, statues. Have you ever seen it?”
“Yes.” I was a little surprised by this. You think you know all about a person and then, topiary. “Well, maybe there’s someplace you can learn. Take a course in, what is it, landscape gardening?”
“It’s not very practical. You said totally free choice. I don’t think there could be much of a demand for it in Manhattan.”
“We could move.”
“Where, Chris?” He smiled, sad and sweet and sexy. That was his kind of appeal. “Beverly Hills?”
“Well, maybe there’s something related that you can do. You know those men who drive around in green trucks and get hoisted into the trees in little metal seats? I think they trim branches off the ones with Dutch elm disease. Or a tree surgeon?”
This didn’t grab him. We talked about plants and trees, and ambition, and doing something you cared about that also provided a living. Finally he said it was a little embarrassing, but what he really might like, in practical terms, was to have a plant store, a big one, like the ones he browsed in down in the Twenties.
“Why should that be embarrassing?”
“When you first met me I was going to alter the power structure of society and now I’m telling you I want to have a plant store. Are you laughing at me, Chris? Tell the truth.”
“I haven’t heard you say anything laughable yet. I didn’t really expect you to change the world, Carl.”
“No?”
“I mean, I believed you meant it, and I believed in you, but that’s not why I married you.” Lord no. I married him for his touch, it struck me, and the sound of his voice, and a thousand other of those things I thought I couldn’t exist without. It also struck me that I had never truly expected to change the power structure but that I had liked hanging out with people who thought they could. It was, I would have to say, inspiring.
“Do you think I’m having a mid-life crisis?”
“No. You’re only thirty-three. I think you want to change jobs.”
So we decided he should try it. He could start by getting a job in a plant store to learn about it, and drive the cab at night. That way we could save some money for a small store to begin with. He would have less time with me and Martine, but it would be worth it in the long run. Except he didn’t do it right away. He liked to sit on things for a while, like a hen.
That summer we scraped together the money to send Martine to a camp run by some people we used to hang out with in the old days, and since it was a camp with animals, sort of a farm camp, she took Mooney along. Her third night away she called collect from Vermont and said she had something very sad to tell us. From her tragic voice, for an instant I thought they might have discovered she had a terminal disease like leukemia, and how could they be so stupid as to tell her—they were progressive types, maybe they thought it was therapeutic to confront your own mortality—but the news was that Mooney was dead. Someone had left the door of the guinea pigs’ cage open the night before and he got out and was discovered in the morning in a nearby field, most likely mauled by a larger animal. I sounded relieved and not tragic enough, but fortunately Carl had the right tone throughout. At the age of eleven she understood a little about the brutalities of nature and the survival of the fittest and so on, but it was still hard for her to accept.
Martine is a peacefully inclined, intuitive type. She would have felt at home in our day, when peace and love were respectable attitudes. We named her after Martin Luther King, which nowadays seems a far-out thing to have done. Not that my estimation of him has changed or that I don’t like the name, only it isn’t the sort of thing people do anymore. Just as, once we stayed up nights thinking of how to transform the world and now I’m glad I have a job, no matter how boring, and can send her to camp for a few weeks.
Anyway, the people running the camp being the way they were, they immediately bought her a new guinea pig. Aside from her tragedy she had a terrific time, and she came home with a female pig named Elf, who strangely enough looked exactly like Mooney, in fact if I hadn’t known Mooney was dead I would have taken Elf for Mooney. I remember remarking to Carl that if things were reversed, if Mooney had been left at home with us and died and we had managed to find an identical bullet-shaped replacement, I might have tried to pass it off as Mooney, in the way mothers instinctively try to protect their children from the harsher facts of life. But Carl said he wouldn’t have, he would have told her the truth, not to make her confront harsh reality but because Martine would be able to tell the difference, as mothers can with twins, and he wouldn’t want her catching him in a lie. “You know she has such high standards,” he said.
In the dead of winter, even colder than in Percy’s era, Martine told us Elf wasn’t eating. Oh no, I thought. Déjà vu. The stillness, then the stiffness, wrapping it in the shoebox, burial at sea ... Nevertheless, what can you do, so I made an appointment with the vet, the same old arrogant vet—I didn’t have the energy to look for a new one. I was feeling sick when the day arrived, so Carl took off from work and went with Martine and Elf.
“There’s good news and bad news,” he said when they got home. “The good news is that she doesn’t have a dread disease. What’s wrong with her is her teeth.”
I was lying in bed, trying to sleep. “Her teeth?”
“You’ve got it. Her top and bottom teeth are growing together so she can’t eat. She can’t separate them to chew.” He gave me a demonstration of Elf’s problem, stretching his lips and straining his molars.
“Please, this is no time to make me laugh. My stomach is killing me.”
“What is it? Your period?”
“No. I don’t know what.”
“Well, listen—the bad news is that she needs surgery. Oral surgery. It’s a hundred twenty-five including the anesthetic.”
“This is not the least bit funny. What are we going to do?” Martine was putting Elf back in her cage, otherwise we would have discussed this with more sensitivity.
“Is there a choice? You know how Martine feels—Albert Schweitzer Junior. I made an appointment for tomorrow. She’ll have to stay overnight.”
“I presume you mean Elf, not Martine.”
“Of course I mean Elf. Maybe I should call a doctor for you too.”
“No, I’ll be okay. What’s a stomachache compared to oral surgery?”
“I don’t want you getting all worked up over this, Chris.” He joined me on the bed and started fooling around. “Thousands of people each year have successful oral surgery. It’s nothing to be alarmed about.”
“I’ll try to deal with it. Ow, you’re leaning right where it hurts.” Martine came into the room and Carl sat up quickly.
“She’s looking very wan,” she said.
“Two days from now she’ll be a new person,” Carl said.
“She’s never been a person before. How could she be one in two days?”
“Medical science is amazing.”
“I have no luck with guinea pigs.” She plopped into a chair, stretched out her legs, and sat gazing at her sneakers. I noticed how tall she was growing. She was nearly twelve and beginning to get breasts. But she wasn’t awkward like most girls at that stage; she was stunning, willowy and auburn-haired, with green eyes. There was sometimes a faint emerald light in the whites of her eyes that would take me by surprise, and I would stare and think, What a lucky accident.
“Maybe none of them live long,” I said. “I doubt if yours are being singled out.”
“They have a four-to-six-year life span. I looked it up in the encyclopedia. But in four years I’ve gone through almost three.”
That night I had such terrible pains in my stomach that Carl took me to the emergency room, where after a lot of fussing around—they tried to send me home, they tried to get me to sleep—they found it was my appendix and it had to come out right away. It was quite a few days before I felt like anything resembling normal, and I forgot completely about Elf’s oral surgery.
“Chris, before we go inside, I’d better tell you something.” Carl switched off the engine and reached into the back seat for my overnight bag. He was avoiding my eyes.
“What happened? I spoke to her on the phone just last night!” I was about to leap out of the car, but he grabbed my arm.
“Hold it a minute, will you? You’re supposed to take it easy.”
“Well what’s wrong, for Chrissake?”
He looked at me. “Not Martine. Jesus! Elf.”
“Elf.” I thought I would pass out. I was still pretty drugged.
“She got through the surgery all right. We brought her home the next day. But ... I don’t know whether she was too weak from not eating or what, but she never started eating again. And so ...”
“I never liked that doctor. How did Martine take it this time?”
“Sad but philosophical. I think she’s used to it by now. Besides, she was more concerned about you.”
“I’m glad to hear that. So where is the corpse? At sea again?”
“Well, no, actually. That’s why I wanted to tell you before you went in the apartment. The temperature has been near zero. The river is frozen.”
“Just give it to me straight, Carl.”
“She’s wrapped in some plastic bags on the bathroom windowsill. Outside. The iron grating is holding her in place. I was going to put her in the freezer with the meat, but I thought you might not care for that.”
“Couldn’t you find a shoebox?”
“No. I guess nobody’s gotten new shoes lately.”
“And how long is she going to stay there?”
“They’re predicting a thaw. It’s supposed to get warm, unseasonably warm, so in a few days we’ll take her out to the park. Anyway, welcome home. Oh, there’s another thing.”
“I hope this is good.”
It was. He had found a job working in the greenhouse at the Botanical Garden.
Since Martine never brought the subject up again after the thaw and the park burial, I assumed the guinea pig phase of her life was over. Two weeks after she returned from camp that summer, the super who had loaned us the spade and shovel for Percy came up to say there was a family in the next building with a new guinea pig, but their baby was allergic to it and couldn’t stop sneezing. Maybe we wanted to do them a favor and take it off their hands?
Martine and I turned to each other. “What do you think?” I said.
“I’m not sure. They’re a lot of expense, aren’t they?”
“Not so bad. I mean, what’s a little lettuce, carrots ...”
“The medical expenses. And you don’t like them too much, do you, Mom?”
I tried to shrug it off with a blank smile. I looked at Mr. Coates—what I expected I’ll never know, since he stood there as if he had seen and heard everything in his lifetime and was content to wait for this discussion to be over. I wondered how much of a tip he would get for the deal. Nothing from us, I vowed.
“I’ve noticed,” Martine said. “You don’t like to handle them. You don’t like small rodents.”
“Not a whole lot, frankly.” They looked to me like rats, fat tailless rats. For Martine’s sake I had wished them good health and long life, but I tried not to get too close. When she was out with her friends and I had to feed them, I used to toss the lettuce in and step back as they lunged for it. I didn’t like the eager squeaks they let out when they smelled the food coming, or the crunching sounds they made eating it. And when I held them—at the beginning, when she would offer them to me to stroke, before she noticed how I felt about small rodents—I didn’t like the nervous fluttery softness of them, their darting squirmy little movements, the sniffing and nipping and the beat of the fragile heart so close to the surface I could feel it in my palms. “But they don’t bother me so long as they’re in the cage in your room.” Which was true.
“You could go over and take a look,” said Mr. Coates finally. “I’ll take you over there if you want.”
“Maybe I’ll do that, Mom. Do you want to come too?”
“No. I know what guinea pigs look like by now.”
“What color is it?” Martine was asking him on the way out.
“I don’t know the color. I ain’t seen it myself yet.”
I didn’t pay any more attention to Rusty, named for his color, than I had to the others. I made sure to be in another room while Martine and Carl cut his nails, one holding him down, the other clipping—they took turns. Martine started junior high and got even more beautiful, breasts, hips, the works, with a kind of slow way of turning her head and moving her eyes. She also started expressing intelligent opinions on every subject in the news, test tube babies, airplane hijackings, chemicals in packaged foods, while Carl and I listened and marveled, with this peculiar guilty relief that she was turning out so well—I guess because we were not living out our former ideals, not changing the world or on the other hand being particularly upwardly mobile either. Carl was happier working in the greenhouse, but we still hadn’t managed to save enough to rent a store or qualify for a bank loan.
At Martine’s thirteenth birthday party in May, we got to talking in the kitchen with one of the mothers who came to pick up her kid. I liked her. She was about our age, small and blonde, and she had dropped out of school too but had gone back to finish and was even doing graduate work.
“What field?” I asked. I was scraping pizza crusts into the garbage while Carl washed out soda cans—he was very big on recycling. In the living room the kids were dancing to a reggae song called “Free Nelson Mandela,” and the three of us had been remarking, first of all, that Nelson Mandela had been in prison since we were about their age and in the meantime we had grown up and were raising children and feeling vaguely disappointed with ourselves, and secondly, that dancing to a record like that wouldn’t have been our style even if there had been one back then, which was unlikely. Singing was more our style. And the fact that teen-agers today were dancing to this “Free Nelson Mandela” record at parties made their generation seem less serious, yet at this point who were we to judge styles of being serious? The man was still in prison, after all.
“Romance languages,” she said. She was playing with the plastic magnetic letters on the refrigerator. They had been there since Martine was two. Sometimes we would use them to write things like Merry Xmas or, as tonight, Happy Birthday, and sometimes to leave real messages, like Skating Back at 7 M. The messages would stay up for the longest time, eroding little by little because we knocked the letters off accidentally and stuck them back any old place, or because we needed a letter for a new message, so that Happy Birthday could come to read Hapy Birda, and at some point they would lose their meaning altogether, like Hay irda, which amused Martine no end. This woman wrote, “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita.”
“What does that mean?” Carl asked her.
“‘In the middle of the journey of our life.’ It’s the opening of The Divine Comedy. What it means is, here I am thirty-five years old and I’m a graduate student.”
“There’s nothing wrong with that,” said Carl. “I admire your determination. I’m driving a cab, but one day before I die I’m going to learn to do topiary, for the simple reason that I want to.”
She said what I knew she would. “What’s topiary?”
He stopped rinsing cans to tell her.
I never read The Divine Comedy, but I do know Dante goes through Hell and Purgatory and eventually gets to Paradise. All the parts you ever hear about, though, seem to take place in Hell, and so a small shiver ran up my spine, seeing that message on the refrigerator above Happy Birthday. Then I forgot about it.
In bed that night I asked Carl if he was serious about learning topiary. He said he had been thinking it over again. Since he had gotten a raise at the greenhouse, maybe he might give up the cab altogether, he was so sick of it, and use the money we’d saved for the store to study landscape gardening.
“Well, okay. That sounds good. I can work a half day Saturdays, maybe.”
“No, I don’t want you to lose the little free time you have. We’ll manage. Maybe there’s something you want to go back and study too.”
“I’m not ambitious. Why, would I be more attractive, like, if I went to graduate school?”
“Ha! Did I hear you right?” He let out a comic whoop. “I don’t even remember her name, Chris. Listen, you want me to prove my love?”
That was the last time. The next day he came down with the flu, then Martine and I got it, and just when we were beginning to come back to life he had a heart attack driving the cab. He might have made it, the doctor said, except he was alone and lost control of the wheel. They told me more details about it, just like a news report, more than I could bear to listen to, in fact. I tried to forget the words the minute I heard them, but no amount of trying could make me stop seeing the scene in my mind. They offered me pills, all through those next insane days, but I wasn’t interested in feeling better. Anyhow, what kind of goddamn pill could cure this? I asked them. I also kept seeing in my mind a scene on the Long Island Expressway when Martine was a baby and we were going to Jones Beach. About three cars ahead of us over in the right lane, a car started to veer, and as we got closer we could see the driver slumping down in his seat. Before we could even think what to do, a state trooper appeared out of nowhere and jumped in on the driver’s side to grab the wheel. Sirens started up, I guess they took him to the hospital, and a huge pile-up was averted. Watching it, I felt bad about how we used to call cops pigs. That sounds a little simpleminded, I know, but so was calling them pigs. And now I wondered how come a miracle in the form of a cop happened for that person and not for Carl, which is a question a retarded person might ask—I mean, an out-of-the-way street in Queens at eleven at night ... It happened the way it happened, that’s all. A loss to all those who might have enjoyed his topiary. I do think he would have done it in his own good time. If only we had had a little more time, I could have taken care of him. I wouldn’t have been a miracle, but I would have done a good job. The way he vanished, though, I couldn’t do a thing, not even say goodbye or hold his hand in the hospital or whatever it is old couples do—maybe the wife whispers that she’ll be joining him soon, but I have no illusions that I’ll ever be joining him, soon or late. I just got a lot less of him than I expected. Another thing is that the last time we made love I was slightly distracted because of the graduate student he admired for her determination, not that anything transpired between them except some ordinary conversation, but it started me wondering in general. Stupid, because I know very well how he felt, he told me every night. Those words I don’t forget. I let them put me to sleep. I lie there remembering how it felt with his arms and legs flung over me and can’t believe I’m expected to get through decades without ever feeling that again.
So I did end up working half days on Saturdays. In July Martine was supposed to go back to the camp run by the progressives and pacifists, where she had always had such a great time except for her tragedy with Mooney, and I didn’t want to begin my life alone by asking for help.
“I don’t have to go,” she said. “If we don’t have the money it’s all right. I don’t think I even feel like going anymore.” My beautiful child with the tragic face. Now she had something worthy of that face.
“You should go, however you feel. When you get there you’ll be glad.”
“Except there’s a slight problem,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“Rusty. I’m not taking him. Not after what happened to Mooney.”
“No,” I agreed.
“Which means ...”
“Oh God! All right, I can do it. How bad can it be? A little lettuce, cabbage, right? A few handfuls of pellets ...”
“There’s the cage to clean too.”
“The cage. Okay.”
It was hard, her going off on the bus, with the typical scene of cheery mothers and fathers crowding around waving brown lunch bags, but I forced myself through it and so did she. I would force myself through the rest of my life if I had to.
First thing every morning and before I went to bed I put a handful of pellets in Rusty’s bowl and fresh water in his bottle, and when I left for work and came home I dropped a few leaves of something green into the cage. Since I never really looked at him I was shocked, the fourth night after Martine left, when Mr. Coates, who had come up to fix the window lock in her room, said in his usual unexcited way, “Your pig’s eye’s popping out.”
The right eye was protruding half an inch out of the socket and the cylindrical part behind it was yellow with gummy pus, a disgusting sight. “Jesus F. Christ,” I said.
“He won’t be no help to you. You need a vet.”
The thought of going back to that arrogant vet who I always suspected had screwed up with Elf was more than I could take, so I searched the yellow pages till I found a woman vet in the neighborhood. When I walked in the next day carrying Rusty in a carton, I knew I had lucked out. She had curly hair like a mop, she wore jeans and a white sweatshirt, and she seemed young, maybe twenty-nine or thirty. Her name was Doctor Dunn. Very good, Doctor Dunn, so there won’t be all that other shit to cope with.
To get him on the examining table I had to lift him up by his middle and feel all the squirminess and the beat of the scared delicate heart between my palms.
“It looks like either a growth of some kind pushing it forward, or maybe an abscess. But in either case I’m afraid the eye will have to go. It’s badly infected and unless it’s removed it’ll dry up and the infection will spread and ... uh ...”
“He’ll die?”
“Right.”
Seventy-five dollars, she said, including his overnight stay, plus twenty-five for the biopsy. Terrific, I thought, just what I need. It was lower than the other vet’s rates, though.
“I want to explain something about the surgery. He’s a very small animal, two pounds or so, and any prolonged anesthesia is going to be risky. What this means is, I can’t make any guarantees. I’d say his chances are ... seventy-thirty, depending on his general condition. Of course, we’ll do everything we can.”
“And if I don’t do it he’ll die anyhow?”
“Right.”
Squirming there on the table was this orange rat whose fate I was deciding. I felt very out of sync with reality, as if I was in a science fiction movie and how did I ever arrive at this place. “Okay. I guess we’d better do it.”
The receptionist I left him with told me to call around four the next day to see how he came through the surgery. If was what she meant. That evening out of habit I almost went in to toss him some celery, then I remembered the cage was empty. There was no reason to go into Martine’s room. But I decided to take the opportunity to clean the cage and the room both. I had found that the more I moved around the more numb I felt, which was what I wanted.
On the dot of four, I called from work. Doctor Dunn answered herself.
“He’s fine! What a trouper, that Rusty! We had him hooked up to the EKG the whole time and monitored him, and he was terrific. I’m really pleased.”
“Thank you,” I managed to say. “Thank you very much.” In one day she had established a closer relationship with him than I had in a year. That was an interesting thought. I mean, it didn’t make me feel emotionally inadequate; I simply realized that’s why she went through years of veterinary school, because she really cared, the way Carl could have about topiary, I guess.
“Can you come in and pick him up before seven? Then I can tell you about the post-op care.”
Post-op care? I had never thought of that. I had never even thought of how the eye would look. Would it be a hole, or just a blank patch of fur? Would there be a bandage on it, or maybe she could fix him up with a special little eye patch?
I found Rusty in his carton on the front desk, with the receptionist petting him and calling him a good boy. “We’re all crazy about him,” she said. “He’s quite a fella, aren’t you, Rusty-baby?”
Where his right eye used to be, there was a row of five black stitches, and the area around it was shaved. Below the bottom stitch, a plastic tube the diameter of a straw and about an inch long stuck out. That was a drain for the wound, Doctor Dunn explained. He had a black plastic collar around his neck that looked like a ruff, the kind you see in old portraits of royalty. To keep him from poking himself, she said.
“Was he in good condition otherwise?” I thought I should sound concerned, in this world of animal-lovers.
“Oh, fine. Now ... The post-operative care is a little complicated, so I wrote it down.” She handed me a list of instructions:
1. Cold compresses tonight, 5–10 minutes.
2. Oral antibiotics, 3 X a day for at least 7 days.
3. Keep collar on at all times.
4. Feed as usual.
5. Call if any excessive redness, swelling, or discharge develops.
6. Come in 3–4 days from now to have drain pulled.
7. Call early next week for biopsy results.
8. Make appointment for suture removal, 10–14 days.
9. Starting tomorrow, apply warm compresses 5–10 minutes, 2 X a day for 10 days.
“Here’s a sample bottle of antibiotics. Maybe I’d better do the first dose to show you how.” She held him to her chest with one hand, while with the other she nudged his mouth open using the medicine dropper and squeezed the drops in, murmuring, “Come on now, that’s a good boy, there you go.” As she wiped the drips off his face and her sweatshirt with a tissue, I thought, Never. This is not happening to me. But I knew it was, and that I would have to go through with it.
When I went to get some ice water for the cold compress that night, I saw the message the graduate student mother had left on the refrigerator near Happy Birthday, which was now Happ Brhday. “Ne mezz I camn di nstr vita,” it read. I knew some letters were missing though not which ones, and those that were left were crooked, but I remembered well enough what it meant. I sat down to watch the ten o’clock news with Rusty on my lap and put the compress on his eye, or the place where his eye used to be, but he squirmed around wildly, clawing at my pants. Ice water oozed onto my legs. I told him to cut it out, he had no choice. Finally I tried patting him and talking to him like a baby, to quiet him. Don’t worry, kiddo, you’re going to be all right—stuff like that, the way Carl would have done without feeling idiotic. It worked. Only hearing those words loosened me a little out of my numbness and I had this terrible sensation of walking a tightrope in pitch darkness, though in fact I was whispering sweet nothings to a guinea pig. I even thought of telling him what I’d been through with my appendix, a fellow sufferer, and God knows what next, but I controlled myself. If I freaked out, who would take care of Martine?
I figured seven and a half minutes for the compress was fair enough—Doctor Dunn had written down 5–10. Then I changed my mind and held it there for another minute so if anything happened I would have a clear conscience when I told Martine. I held him to my chest with a towel over my shirt, feeling the heart pulsing against me, and squirted in the antibiotic. I lost a good bit, but I’d have plenty of chances to improve.
In the morning I found the collar lying in the mess of shit and cedar chips in his cage. I washed it and tried to get it back on him, but he fought back with his whole body—each time I fitted it around his neck he managed to squirm and jerk his way out, till beyond being repelled I was practically weeping with frustration. Two people could have done it easily. Carl, I thought, if ever I needed you ... Finally after a great struggle I got it fastened in back with masking tape so he wouldn’t undo it. But when I came home from work it was off again and we wrestled again. The next morning I rebelled. The drops, the compresses, okay, but there was no way I was going to literally collar a rodent morning and night for ten days. There are limits to everything, especially on a tightrope in the dark. I called Doctor Dunn from work.
“Is he poking himself around the eye?” she asked. “Any bleeding or discharge? Good. Then forget it. You can throw the collar away.”
I was so relieved.
“How is he otherwise? Is he eating?”
“Yes. He seems okay. Except he’s shedding.” I told her how when I lifted him up, orange hairs fluttered down into his cage like leaves from a tree. When leaves fell off Carl’s plants, which I was also trying to keep alive though that project wasn’t as dramatic, it usually meant they were on their way out. I had already lost three—I didn’t have his green thumb. It seemed my life had become one huge effort to keep things alive, with death hot on my trail. I even had nightmares about what could be happening to Martine at camp. When I wrote to her, though, I tried to sound casual, as if I was fine, and I wrote that Rusty was fine too. Maybe Carl would have given her all the gory details, but I didn’t mind lying. He was going to be fine. I was determined that pig would live even if it was over my dead body. Luckily I wasn’t so far gone as to say all this to Doctor Dunn. “Is that a bad sign?”
“Shedding doesn’t mean anything,” she said. “He doesn’t feel well, so he’s not grooming himself as usual. It’ll stop as he gets better.”
I also noticed, those first few days, he would do this weird dance when I put the food in his cage. It dawned on me that he could smell it but not see it. While he scurried around in circles, I kept trying to shove it towards his good side—kind of a Bugs Bunny routine. Then after a while he developed a funny motion, turning his head to spot it, and soon he was finding it pretty well with his one eye. I told Doctor Dunn when I brought him in to have the drain removed. She said yes, they adapt quickly. They compensate. She talked about evolution and why eyes were located where they were. Predators, she said, have close-set eyes in the front of their heads to see the prey, and the prey have eyes at the sides, to watch out for the predators. How clever, I thought, the way nature matched up the teams. You couldn’t change your destiny, but you had certain traits that kept the game going and gave you the illusion of having a fighting chance. We talked about it for a good while. She was interesting, that Doctor Dunn.
A few days later she plucked out the stitches with tweezers while I held him down.
“I have to tell you,” she said, “not many people would take such pains with a guinea pig. Some people don’t even bother with dogs and cats, you’d be amazed. They’d rather have them put away. You did a terrific job. You must really love animals.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell her that although it didn’t turn my stomach anymore to hold him on my lap and stroke him for the compresses, he was still just a fat rat as far as I was concerned, but a fat rat which fate had arranged I had to keep alive. So I did.
“Well, you could say I did it for love.”
She laughed. “Keep applying the warm compresses for another day or two, to be on the safe side. Then that’s it. Case closed.”
“What about the biopsy?”
“Oh yes, the lab report. It’s not in yet, but I have a feeling it wasn’t malignant. He doesn’t look sick to me. Call me on it next week.”
In eleven days Martine will be back. Beautiful Martine, with her suntan making her almost the color of Rusty. I’ll warn her about the eye before she sees him. It doesn’t look too gruesome now, with the stitches out and the hair growing back—soon it’ll be a smooth blank space. In fact, if not for the missing eye she would never have to know what he went through. The house will feel strange to her all over again without Carl, because whenever you’re away for a while you expect to come home to some pure and perfect condition. She’ll be daydreaming on the bus that maybe it was all a nightmare and the both of us are here waiting for her. But it’ll be an altogether different life, and the worst thing is—knowing us, sensible, adaptable types—that one remote day we’ll wake up and it’ll seem normal this way, and in years to come Carl will turn into the man I had in my youth instead of what he is now, my life. I even envy her—he’ll always be her one father.
So I’m applying the warm compresses for the last time, sitting here with a one-eyed guinea pig who is going to live out his four-to-six-year life span no matter what it takes, in the middle of the journey of my life, stroking him as if I really loved animals.