nine

Mother’s friends keep coming to her apartment for the next few days. The women always give Mother a big kiss, and Mother kisses them back, and they all call each other darling and things like that. All the men who come look like each other. When they say darling to Mother, they don’t say it loud like the women. When I am introduced to them, they ask me how I am and am I enjoying New York and what grade am I in. I am glad that Fred does a lot of barking because that gives me a chance to talk about how much Fred barks and to explain that in our town it was very quiet, and that the people who came to visit our house were usually people like Aunt Louise and Uncle Bert or maybe some ladies who used to come to play bridge with my grandmother. Fred barked then too, but that was different. Then he had to protect his turf only once a week. Now he has to protect it several times a day. Mother tells me that’s the way it is during the holidays, and I can see that she is ready to clobber Fred. So I take him out for a lot of long walks. There’s no question of letting him off his leash now. My walks are around the blocks near Mother’s. When she has a lot of people visiting her, I walk around her blocks two or three times. I think that I’ll get Fred tired out and he’ll go to sleep when he goes up to Mother’s apartment. He never does. He jumps all over Mother’s friends and barks at every new one who comes.

Fred also has a very hard time learning where it is all right to do his business. Before, if Fred made a mess on someone’s front lawn or right in front of someone’s front door, it wasn’t a big catastrophe. I used to push it into the street, and there weren’t any hard feelings. Not in New York. The block Mother lives on is all fixed up, like Mother’s place, to look like it looked a hundred years ago. It’s very pretty compared to other blocks I can see from walking Fred in the neighborhood. The trouble is that everyone on the block knows it’s very pretty. They spend a lot of time yelling at me not to let Fred plop in front of their houses. Fred doesn’t understand what the yelling is about, and after three days he takes a raised voice as his cue to evacuate. This is no way to make friends in a new neighborhood. I decide that the problem is not one I want to have a “heart-to-heart” with Mother about. There’s no one I can talk to about it. So I tell Fred what I guess are the rules of the game here in New York. Fred, gentleman that he is, is a good listener to my three-times-a-day lecture. I guess he thinks it’s lovemaking. I can see right away though that we’ve got a big problem on our hands.

The fourth day I am at Mother’s place sees Mother gloomier than usual at breakfast when Fred comes loping up to her chair and curls himself around her feet. She is wearing a bathrobe with light feathers around the bottom, and Fred enjoys nibbling at the hem. Mother keeps pulling it away from Fred. He thinks that’s a big game, until finally she says, “This is a Christmas present, Davy! I’m not ready to turn the whole house over to Fred yet!”

I say I’m sorry. Fred likes the feathers. They tickle him, and when she moves them away from him, he doesn’t understand that she isn’t playing with him. He thinks that if he likes feathers, feathers are his friends.

“How do you know what he thinks?” Mother asks. “Dogs don’t think. They just sit around and respond to every temptation they are faced with. I don’t know why Mother ever got you Fred in the first place. We never had dogs when we were growing up.”

“Grandmother loved Fred too.”

“Oh, yeah?” Mother says in a loud voice. Then she stops saying anything at all and speaks softly. “Sure she did, Davy. I’m sorry, sweetheart. I shouldn’t be angry with Fred. I’m not used to him yet.”

She gets up from the table and puts her arm around me.

“Give me a kiss.”

She bends down, and I sort of kiss her. She laughs, friendly, as she can be when she wants to be. She bends down to rub Fred, who has been jumping all over her while she was kissing me.

“Oh, that’s my Fred,” she says, talking goofy. “Fred, Fred, Fred. That’s a good doggie.”

Fred is wagging his tail like some machine. He has decided that Mother is some big love of his life now. If he only knew what she was saying about him two minutes ago! She goes out to the kitchen to get more coffee for herself, and Fred follows her like she’s Cleopatra. I can hear her making a few more goofy sounds at Fred in the kitchen. I’m pleased, I guess. But why did she say those things just a few minutes ago? I can’t figure it out, and maybe I won’t ever. So why bother? I pick up my plate, which is clean because I like scrambled eggs the way my mother makes them. She puts in cheese and onions and a whole lot of stuff so that they don’t taste like eggs at all. The first day she did that, I let Fred lick the plate, but she said that was obscene. When I looked up the word in the dictionary, I decided that I wouldn’t let Fred do that any more. Anyway, I pile a few other plates on my own to take them to the kitchen where Mother and Fred are making all that love, and I look into this mirror hanging on the wall. It’s hung so that I can see out into the kitchen. I’m not looking into the mirror for any special reason, but I just happen to glance into it as I am bringing the dishes to the kitchen. I see Mother’s reflection. She has this bottle of whiskey in her hands. Her eyes are closed, and I can see that she has just had a big swallow of it. I shiver, I guess. It’s dumb, but I don’t want her to know I have seen her in the mirror. Or I don’t want her to know I have seen her at all is more to the point. I can’t look away from the mirror. I want to turn away, but I want to know if she’s going to have another drink out of the bottle. She raises it to her mouth and takes a big gulp. She’s still talking to Fred too, and I get the impression that she’s talking to Fred so friendly so that I will think what I thought, that there is some big love feast going on over the pot of coffee. She puts the bottle down with all the other bottles on her shelf and then pours coffee into her cup. I edge toward the kitchen with my plates.

“Hi,” I say as though we just saw each other for the first time today.

“Hi, darling!” she answers. “Fred and I are going to run away to celebrate the New Year together! What would you think about that? Would you be jealous, sweetheart?” She gives me one of her big hugs.

“Come on,” I say. “I’m going to break your dishes if you hug me.” She smells like she does when she kisses me good-night.

She takes the dishes from my hands and puts them into her metal sink. “Dishes, dishes, dishes,” she says. “What are dishes?”

Fred is sitting up on his hind legs now, begging for who knows what.

“Fred wants you to hug him,” I say.

Mother makes the nutty noises people make to dogs when they guess they are talking to them. It’s not exactly goochy-goo, but close to it. She does bend down to Fred and lets him give her a few big licks. I’m the real stiff in the picture, I conclude. So what if Mother wants whiskey in the morning? It’s none of my business. Fred likes to give her licks regardless of what she drinks. Fred probably has more sense than I have. Right? Who’s to say?

I tell Mother that I’d better take Fred out for a walk. “Didn’t you take him before breakfast?” she asks.

“Yes,” I say.

“He doesn’t have to go out twenty times a day, Davy.”

“Sure. I know that.”

“Then why are you forever running down the stairs with him?”

“I don’t know. He likes it, I think,” I answer. “He likes to go out and sniff around. You know.”

“As a matter of fact, I don’t know.” She says this with her snotty voice, the one I hate the most.

“It’s that it’s new for him, Mother. He likes to sniff around. That’s all. And I’m not going to be able to take him out so much next week when I’m in school.”

“You always seem to be going out or coming in with Fred, Davy. Aren’t you two ever just going to stay?” Mother’s voice cracks a bit when she says this, so I say sure we’re going to stay. She understands that this is a new place for both of us, right? Maybe it takes us a little time to go out and come in at the right time, but we’ll learn. Is that OK?

She says sure it’s OK, and she’s sorry that she sounds like a nag, and one of the biggest and most important things in her life is that she shouldn’t sound like a nag, and more important that she shouldn’t be a nag, and do I understand the difference?

I say sure I understand the difference. And I hope I didn’t make her feel that I thought she was a nag. If I did, I’m sorry.

“Oh, no!” she says. “Davy, sweetheart, there’s nothing to be sorry about. Oh, sweetheart, Mother wants most of all to have a lovely home for her baby. You understand that, don’t you?”

I tell her sure I do. She gives me another one of her hugs, and I’m sorry, I want to get out of it. My stomach turns over inside, I think, and I pull away from Mother. Does she know it!

“There’s something wrong with you animal lovers,” she says very loud. “You think you’re better than the rest of us. I’ll tell you something, Davy sweetheart, animals are from hunger! Don’t forget it!”

I look at Mother for a minute. She’s nuts, I guess. I want to go back to my real home. I want this to be a short vacation, over on New Year’s Day.

“I’m going to take Fred out,” I say abruptly. “Come on, Fred.” Fred’s ready to go in half a second. I get my coat and go to Mother’s front door.

“Take your damned dog out,” she says. “Have yourself a damned good time. Stay out the whole damned day if you wish. Forget about your damned mother, Davy!”

I open the door and Fred races out into Mother’s hallway. I run after him and the door slams shut. Oh, God, I think to myself.

“Oh, God,” I hear Mother saying on the other side of the door.