My wife wants a dog. She already has a baby. The baby’s almost two. My wife says that the baby wants the dog.
My wife has been wanting a dog for a long time. I have had to be the one to tell her that she couldn’t have it. But now the baby wants a dog, my wife says. This may be true. The baby is very close to my wife. They go around together all the time, clutching each other tightly. I ask the baby, who is a girl, “Whose girl are you? Are you Daddy’s girl?” The baby says, “Momma,” and she doesn’t just say it once, she says it repeatedly, “Momma Momma Momma.” I don’t see why I should buy a hundred-dollar dog for that damn baby.
The kind of dog the baby wants, my wife says, is a cairn terrier. This kind of dog, my wife says, is a Presbyterian like herself and the baby. Last year the baby was a Baptist—that is, she went to the Mother’s Day Out program at the First Baptist twice a week. This year she is a Presbyterian because the Presbyterians have more swings and slides and things. I think that’s pretty shameless and I have said so. My wife is a legitimate lifelong Presbyterian and says that makes it O.K.: way back when she was a child she used to go to the First Presbyterian in Evansville, Illinois. I didn’t go to church, because I was a black sheep. There were five children in my family and the males rotated the position of black sheep among us, the oldest one being the black sheep for a while while he was in his D.W.I. period or whatever and then getting grayer as he maybe got a job or was in the service and then finally becoming a white sheep when he got married and had a grandchild. My sister was never a black sheep, because she was a girl.
Our baby is a pretty fine baby. I told my wife for many years that she couldn’t have a baby because it was too expensive. But they wear you down. They are just wonderful at wearing you down, even if it takes years, as it did in this case. Now I hang around the baby and hug her every chance I get. Her name is Joanna. She wears Oshkosh overalls and says “no,” “bottle,” “out,” and “Momma.” She looks most lovable when she’s wet, when she’s just had a bath and her blond hair is all wet and she’s wrapped in a beige towel. Sometimes when she’s watching television she forgets that you’re there. You can just look at her. When she’s watching television, she looks dumb. I like her better when she’s wet.
This dog thing is getting to be a big issue. I said to my wife, “Well you’ve got the baby. Do we have to have the damn dog too?” The dog will probably bite somebody, or get lost. I can see myself walking all over our subdivision asking people, “Have you seen this brown dog?” “What’s its name?” they’ll say to me, and I’ll stare at them coldly and say, “Michael.” That’s what she wants to call it, Michael. That’s a silly name for a dog and I’ll have to go looking for this possibly rabid animal and say to people, “Have you seen this brown dog? Michael?” It’s enough to make you think about divorce.
What’s that baby going to do with that dog that it can’t do with me? Romp? I can romp. I took her to the playground at the school. It was Sunday and there was nobody there, and we romped. I ran, and she tottered after me at a good pace. I held her as she slid down the slide. She groped her way through a length of big pipe they have there set in concrete. She picked up a feather and looked at it for a long time. I was worried that it might be a diseased feather but she didn’t put it in her mouth. Then we ran some more over the patched bare softball field and through the arcade that connects the temporary wooden classrooms, which are losing their yellow paint, to the main building. Joanna will go to this school someday, if I stay in the same job.
I looked at some dogs at Pets-A-Plenty, which has birds, rodents, reptiles, and dogs, all in top condition. They showed me the cairn terriers. “Do they have their prayer books?” I asked. This woman clerk didn’t know what I was talking about. The cairn terriers ran about two ninety-five per, with their papers. I started to ask if they had any illegitimate children at lower prices, but I could see that it would be useless and the woman already didn’t like me, I could tell.
What is wrong with me? Why am I not a more natural person, like my wife wants me to be? I sit up, in the early morning, at my desk on the second floor of our house. The desk faces the street. At five-thirty in the morning, the runners are already out, individually or in pairs, running toward rude red health. I’m sipping a glass of Gallo Chablis with an ice cube in it, smoking, worrying. I worry that the baby may jam a kitchen knife into an electrical outlet while she’s wet. I’ve put those little plastic plugs into all the electrical outlets, but she’s learned how to pop them out. I’ve checked the Crayolas. They’ve made the Crayolas safe to eat—I called the head office in Pennsylvania. She can eat a whole box of Crayolas and nothing much will happen to her. If I don’t get the new tires for the car, I can buy the dog.
I remember the time, thirty years ago, when I put Herman’s mother’s Buick into a cornfield, on the Beaumont highway. There was a car coming at me in my lane, and I didn’t hit it, and it didn’t hit me. I remember veering to the right and down into the ditch and up through the fence and coming to rest in the cornfield and then getting out to wake Herman and the two of us going to see what the happy drunks in the other car had come to, in the ditch on the other side of the road. That was when I was a black sheep, years and years ago. That was skillfully done, I think. I get up, congratulate myself in memory, and go in to look at the baby.
| 1983 |