7

I HEADED DOWNTOWN in the after-supper dusk the following Saturday, enjoying the heat on the first day that the temperature had been over eighty since I arrived nearly a month ago. I had on my best white shorts with blue patch pockets on the back, and my red halter with a sailor collar, showing off a suntanned back and lots of leg in celebration of summer weather at last. I had good puppy on her short working leash, in her nifty orange Companion Dog vest, so she would know right off that this was the kind of outing where you had to attend to your name and directions, and different from the freeplay afternoons on the long umbilical leash at the Dog Park.

We had been down to the brick streets lined with shops, closed to cars, before. We’d bought bread from the cute guy at the fresh-bread kiosk, navigated around other dogs large and small, and found the fountain across from the Unitarian Church, (from which Church Street got its name), where Beulah knew she could not splash, being a puppy-in-training and therefore not allowed to explore her environment when she was on her working leash. One late afternoon we’d stopped at a sidewalk cafe and I’d had a cup of coffee with milk and a toasted sesame bagel, while she sat attentive by my chair, not minding that at near-by tables huskies and shepherds got to share muffins with their back-packing persons. It was really hard for me, to eat with her just sitting there, but I understood: a trained dog should not be distracted from her duty to her person by the tempting smell of pastrami or fries, nor could her blind person handle a puppy cadging food from strangers.

Beulah liked to have outings, which she was supposed to do a lot, and coming downtown was part of helping her become a mannerly companion. For instance most always there’d be some dog a block away barking, which she was not allowed to do, and although I knew how to put my hand on her throat to stop her while telling her to sit, she’d learned not to be distracted by the other dogs, or by the occasional one who would jump up on its person who then had to shout, “Quit that, no, no, bad dog,” words that we never used with our puppies who were raised only with praise.

Most days when we went downtown there wasn’t much of a crowd. I’d started noticing a fair number of women with long braids down their backs or over one shoulder, sometimes brown or silver, plus a lot of men with beards, some of them old as time, wearing bandanas around their foreheads. And there would always be a cluster or two of French-speaking visitors come down from Canada. But hardly any blacks, and that felt weird to me, coming from the South: as if I’d landed in a gated state.

This Saturday, however, turned out to be different. Even though I knew it was the Jazz Festival and even though I’d heard loudspeakers calling to us like sirens to come out, I hadn’t prepared myself. That is, I hadn’t prepared Beulah for about a thousand people at least, wandering around, crowding the outdoor tables, listening to the sounds of clarinets, saxes, keyboards coming from open cafe doors or over the mikes on high nailed-together bandstands. A way mixed crowd brought to town by the music—crowds of blacks (island blacks, African blacks, and downhome blacks), scattered Asians, clusters of tourists speaking in French and German and a language I couldn’t guess.

I felt out of place and alien in my red, white and blue American flag outfit, showing four-foot of bare leg and half a yard of bare back, when all the visible females near my age wore ground-dragging skirts or doubled-over army pants riding on the pubic bone and undershirt-style tees in what I guess you’d call vegetarian colors: eggplant, squash, pumpkin, kale, mushroom.

But I tried to enjoy being out and to keep my mind on Beulah, who stuck close beside my leg in the mob, and didn’t, the way another dog would, at any time sniff the sides of buildings to see who’d been there before, or try to mark the poles that held up the store awnings, or whine at being down there in proximity to a couple of hundred shins. Trying to make a space between bodies to steer her through, I felt something warm and wet nose around my butt, and wheeled to see a humongous white shaggy dog of immense presence and beauty—looking at my girl as if at a snack. Quickly, I did the defensive move from the Puppy Manual and placed my creamy lab between my calves, protecting her with my body, and said in a friendly way to the rail-thin woman in a long paisley skirt holding onto the outsized hound, “My, isn’t he big? Sheep dog?”

“Pyrenees,” she corrected, but, spotting my dog, tugged her chummy monster away by his choke collar.

Slowly, I maneuvered us along the strip of shops in the direction of Banana Republic, where I’d seen a red hoodie that I thought would cheer me up and be just right for windy walks along the lake, though I could see it might be too bright to wear downtown. I didn’t used to worry about clothes at home—if we were going out, back when we meant Curtis and me, I’d change from my white pharmacist’s coat into a flowered dress and maybe sandals with heels. And take a little time with my face, so I’d feel in a party mood and he’d take notice. Or if he was going to be late, just put on running shorts.

But they’d changed the window displays since I’d last been here last; now every single window featured Father’s Day outfits—khakis and white shirts, white shorts and khaki tees. But surely fathers didn’t buy their clothes at Banana Republic? I tried to imagine mine, Talbot Daniels, out of his pressed shirt with no tie for the hardware store, buying an outfit for mowing the back yard or sitting in the sunroom, with his bedroom slippers on, watching golf, a game he’d never played. But then it came to me, slowly and with a kind of heavy weight attached to it, that some fathers were no older than I was, that some fathers were exactly the age of me. Curtis for instance. Curtis who would be one before the next time these windows got dressed up to honor daddies.

In zero seconds, my eyes flooded and having no sleeve to wipe them on, I used the little cloth bag with cows on it I’d bought to carry my wallet and keys. Sopping wet quilted cows. “Oh, Beulah,” I sniffed, there in the herds of hundreds milling by who paid me no mind. And when she looked up at me, hearing her name, I had to say, “Good girl,” and tell her to sit, and then say it again, because she did.

Then, just as I heaved a sigh and bent to wipe my nose on the back of the cows again, the person from the Dog Park appeared, looking just the same: familiar. A comforting sight, for what did I care what someone like him, with the straggly face hair and mushed-down hat, thought of my making a display of myself on Church Street in plain sight of legions of the friends of jazz.

“Janey?” He peered at me.

“James.” I held out my damp hand.

“Hey,” he bent and spoke to good dog, who seemed to sense that she’d been in the vicinity of his kneecaps before, although she glanced around as if looking for his big three-colored dog from the park. He introduced me to another teacher about his age named Pete, the sort of pudgy sidekick with overbite, old remnants of acne, and an eager smile that I also remembered from school. So I liked him, too. And to three of their students with various piercings who claimed their names were Cubby, Wolf and Lobo.

I shook all their hands, wiping mine dry, telling them I was from South Carolina, a foreign country to them.

“I was going to call you,” James explained, apparently not bothered that his people were listening in as best they could among the din, “but I didn’t get your last name.”

“Daniels,” I said, “anyway, I’m not in the book; I’ve just got my cell up here.” Then, because I felt warm toward him, for coming along at the right time and acting like he was glad to almost literally run into me, I told him the truth. “I looked you up in the phone book, but there were nine James Martins, four of them married.” I smiled.

“Hey, hey,” one of the kids gave him an elbow.

“It’s M-a-a-r-t-e-n.” He spelled it for me.

“That’s Dutch or something.”

“Yeah, they spell it like that over there.”

Pete said, “We take students abroad, that’s what we do, James and I, the ones doing the summer abroad programs. He does The Netherlands and I do Germany. The Experiment in International Living sets it up for us.” He looked proud. “Over there I spell my name P-i-e-t-e-r.”

I looked at him, and then at James, with appreciation. World travelers. It made sense. That’s what happened to those boys who appeared in our classes for a few years, got top grades and high scores, and then vanished. They went somewhere.

They asked me if I’d like to head up the street with them, but I said, “Puppy’s worn out,” and by then she must have been.

James hung back after the others started off. “You were, uh, crying it looked like? When we came up?”

I nodded, thumping my cow-bag against my bare thigh. “Yeah, a little, I was. I guess it was seeing all this stuff for Father’s Day.” I gestured. “In the windows?”

He looked away and tugged his knit cap down over his eyebrows. (A knit cap in midsummer? It must be a local thing.) “Yeah, Father’s Day.”

“Here,” I said, and wrote my cell number on the back of his hand with a felt pen, hoping he wouldn’t smudge it too much to read. Then, giving him a wave, I began to inch through the mob with Beulah by my side, letting him think I was some sort of noodley person who would be weepy over her daddy at twenty-five years of age.

For a minute I considered getting a Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia cone, but when we pushed our way to their parlor, there must’ve been fifty-five people waiting in line for cones, half of them outside on the street, two of whom happened to be young, pink-cheeked and pregnant. I didn’t need that.

Instead, I turned down a near-empty side street into a warm and gusty wind which I took gratefully in my lungs. And we listened for a minute, catching our breath, to the fading sounds of a wailing clarinet.

When we passed the pharmacy, still open and doing business, I couldn’t help it, I had to go in. And if Beulah had been allowed to pee on some car tire in the parking lot and scarf down a people-treat such as a chocolate-chip cookie, I would have stayed till they closed the doors, seeing who came in at this hour with that wrinkled scrap of paper in some doctor’s handwriting, who came in just to read the labels on the herbals, needing something for their vague unease. Instead, promising my good dog, whose big paws were slowing and whose middle was sagging, that we’d just do a walk-in, I led her through the automatic doors, knowing she would be welcome in her puppy-in-training vest.

How quickly even the smell, that faint drugstore mix of cosmetics, cleaning supplies, sick people, and drugs, made me stop dead still and have to close my eyes with homesickness. After all, it hadn’t been my job I’d run away from; it hadn’t been the people who needed me every week of their lives to stay of sound mind and ambulatory. Who else could they get down there who’d know what I knew about everybody? No one at all.

Back out on the sidewalk, I stood stock still a minute calming down. That asshole Curtis, of all the wrong-hearted and wooden-headed things he’d done to me, including knocking up his old high school squeeze, this had to be the worst. Making me leave my work had to be the worst.