Parcheesi

She was always red and yellow; I was always blue and green.  We played on her back porch, no matter the weather, her transistor radio tuned to WIFI 92.  We played through the summer in cutoff shorts and striped t-shirts.  We played through the winter in our parkas, fake-fur-trimmed hoods extended to protect our faces from the wind.  The porch was our place, light filtering in through the green corrugated fiberglass roof.  

She won.  She always won.  Actually, that’s not entirely true.  She only won 489 games.  I won eleven.

She won because she believed in winning.  I lost because I was an idealist. 

Parcheesi, at least the way Wendy played it, included a rule that went like this: if you landed on a space occupied by another player’s token, you sent that player’s token back to Start. As if that were not enough, you also got to advance 20 more spaces.

I was incredulous. How is that right?  If you are a race car driver, and you purposely knock another player’s car into the wall and it explodes into a ball of fire, do they shave 30 seconds off your time as a bonus?  I think not. 

I protested.  Wendy gleefully showed me the rule sheet in which this gross breach of decency was printed in black and white.  I sulked, but I did not refuse to play.  We kept playing all that year, carefully lifting her cat, Nightlight, from the board whenever he began batting the tokens with his paw.  We sang along at the top of our lungs to “Billy, Don’t be a Hero,” and “The Night Chicago Died.”  We popped popcorn and experimented with putting food coloring into the melted margarine.  Not surprisingly, her addition of red turned out a pleasing orange, while my addition of blue made my popcorn an unappetizing olive drab.

When it was my turn to roll the dice, sometimes I had the option to land on a space occupied by one of her tokens.  I made a proposal that I thought was a brilliant compromise: what if I were to send her token back, but forgo the extra 20 spaces?  I argued that it was like usury, that Biblical law that prohibits charging interest on a loan. Wendy, a Lutheran, flatly nixed that idea.  It was against the rules. 

There was only one ethically upright thing to do, and I did it.  I moved a different token.  I never sent her pieces back to start, not even if she were about to win.  I thought it was rude and wrong, and I refused to do it.  “Suit yourself!” she said, cheerfully.  “Look—one of my guys can make it into home.”

So I lost.  A lot.   I was completely cognizant of the fact that all that it made me was a sucker, but I had dug in my heels.  You might even wonder how it is that I won those eleven games, and I have to say that even the obstinately deluded are occasionally granted some luck.

The next year, when her interest in boys overcame her interest in anything else, I was not sorry to see the Parcheesi board relegated to a high shelf in her bedroom closet, replaced by racy novels, a coded diary, and the fabrication of a library of highly creative lies to tell her parents. 

Wendy had moved in next door when I was in first grade and she in fifth, daughter of a just-retired career army man, the youngest of four children.  The oldest girl was already out of the house and married by the time they moved to our street; later I would babysit her boys in the evenings after school.  In that first year, though, Wendy set her mind to the task of making me into a viable friend.  The age difference at first seemed a barrier, but as an otherwise solitary and socially awkward child, I was happy to aspire to early maturity, to emulate her worldly ways.  I learned to swim when her mother invited me to go to the swim club with them.  I didn’t want to miss whatever exciting thing Wendy might do on the other side of the pool, so I went from dog-paddle to a messy but effective freestyle in a matter of hours.

My mother and I had a swim membership at Westtown School Lake, a large pond on the property of a Quaker school about half an hour’s drive from home.  It was a lot less expensive than the swim club, and it had trees and woods and picnic tables and outdoor bathhouses that smelled bad and were infested with daddy longlegs. 

The water in the lake was not clear; it was varying shades of brown, and if you dove under the water you were likely to come up with seaweed—pond weed—draped over your head.  Still, the ancient wooden dock wrapped in sisal was cool, and we were allowed to run the length of it and take a flying leap into the water.  There was a floating dock, too, and once I truly learned to swim with Wendy, I could swim out to the dock at Westtown.  I could drag myself up onto it—even though that made it rock wildly—if  I could brave the slimy green substance that coated the sides.  Wendy did not come with us.  She thought the whole seaweed situation was gross. 

Some days, the four years between us seemed like nothing, but when it came to boys, she had a line of drooling suitors wrapped around the block while I was still a tagalong little kid. I had three useful skills, however. I could make up stories, write excellent essays and other papers (even four grade levels ahead of my own), and decide things.  Widely considered to have power to obtain wisdom from the shadowy realms beyond human logic, I was consulted when Wendy needed wise counsel.  Matters of the heart were particularly needful of this sort of input.  What logic is there in dealing with a teenage boy, anyway?

The summer that Wendy was fifteen, she attended a dance at Walber’s On the Delaware, a restaurant that was, in fact, situated on the shores of the Delaware River.  The Delaware at this point was not exactly a tourist magnet.  Essington was most known for being bordered by the Philadelphia airport, a highly polluted marshland, several factories, and the oil refineries of Marcus Hook.  There was, however, a tiny park next to Walber’s commemorating early Swedish settlers or something similarly historic. Growing up on the outskirts of Philadelphia had the effect of developing in me a violent distaste for the period of colonial and early American history that lasted several decades.  If I’d had one more field trip to Betsy Ross’s house, I might have tried to smuggle in some matches and lighter fluid.

It was in that little park that we were able to access the actual water’s edge.  Almost.  First, though, we had to bicycle for several miles on Route 291, the aptly named Industrial Highway.  Sandwiched between the interstate and the factories that lined the banks of the great gray expanse of river, it was primarily used for commercial traffic between those factories and the airport. Wendy had a three-speed bike, but I didn’t have one of my own.  I rode her last bike, a single-speed model, not flashy but serviceable. 

As I rode behind her, trying to take advantage of her wake, we careened down the shoulder of the highway.  The hardest part was staying upright when the eighteen-wheelers roared past, kicking up bits of gravel and glass and belching diesel smoke.  More than a few of the truck drivers sounded their bone-rattling air horns, whether to warn us of their approach or to express appreciation for Wendy’s curves.  Occasionally they might have sounded them in indignation or horror at the abandon with which we crossed lanes of traffic in our quest to get to the water, the right water, the significant water, the water across which Wendy had gazed on her first real date.

That was really why we went to Essington.  It was a pilgrimage, of sorts, a wish to remain connected with the magic of a certain evening, although the boy was long gone and had been mostly a prop anyway.  She had already assembled a list of the qualities most desirable in the next boyfriend, but I was ready and willing to soak up whatever reflected happiness might have been available at the place where it had all begun.

            Toxic sludge was what greeted us at our destination.  Once we’d run the gauntlet of internal combustion peril, our eyes took in the view.  In most weather, there were fifty yards of black mud between us and the water.  We scrambled down to what should have been the water’s edge—was, I suppose, at high tide or after a few days of rain—and sank to our suntanned knees in muck.  Wendy’s determination was unmatched by the unpleasant sucking sensation of the oil-laced mud, and we struggled out to where the opaque brown water began.

            Then we could say that we got what we came for: to wade in the mighty Delaware, the boundary between dull, everyday Pennsylvania and exciting, ocean-lapped New Jersey, where all vacation dreams were born.  We could see New Jersey, but the closest we would get to being there was to be surrounded by that water.  Massive tankers steamed past, gestating great swells of brown water that slapped our waiting thighs.

            Our mothers had no idea.  It was years before they found out how far we’d gone, and by what hair-raising route.  It’s not that we were hiding it from them; we just found them to be irrelevant in everyday matters.  Their province was dinner, bedtime, and shopping.  The days were ours, and they stretched from horizon to horizon.

            Wendy was a woman of action.  She had ideas, and she made them happen.  She taught me to do some basic gymnastics, taught me to be her assistant as she pounded the pavement for school fundraisers, determined to be the highest seller in her class. We participated religiously in charity walk-a-thons and bike-a-thons, singing One Hundred Bottles of Beer On the Wall as we slogged through mile after mile of puddles.  Each year, the organizers of the twenty-mile March of Dimes Walk-a-Thon promised that this year we’d have sunshine, but we rarely did.  At mile marker ten in 1975, I wondered what happened if people couldn’t go on, just sat down and couldn’t move.  Wendy grabbed an apple from the refreshment stand, slapped it into my palm, and said cheerfully, “We’re making great time!”  I took a bite of the apple and put one foot in front of the other.

We roller-skated to the candy store, skate keys around our necks on strings, slinging our skates over our shoulders to tiptoe in and dally over the jars of penny candy, shoelace licorice and pixie stix.  We watched The Mod Squad and The Rookies on the black-and-white television in her basement, crunching popcorn doused in margarine, pleased to be breaking my mother’s rule about avoiding violent shows. We watched The Six Million Dollar Man and then The Bionic Woman, and we wondered why Jamie Somers always seemed to need Steve Austin to rescue her, even though she had her own super strength and super speed.  We acted out scenes from Land of the Giants, a late-sixties sci-fi classic about the crew of a spaceship who landed on a planet on which they were as tiny as dolls in relation to the planet’s inhabitants.  This would have been great except that she insisted on being the man in charge and his young protégé, while I had to be the missy-prissy ladies and the kid.  I mumbled under my breath that someday I would play the good parts.

In high school, I did play the good parts in school plays, and I attribute my ability to do that—despite my shyness—to Wendy’s example, to what I learned in following her through the adventures of her life.  She joined an Explorer troop in her fifteenth year, one whose primary mission was to serve refreshments to volunteer firefighters at fire scenes.  When she returned from a fire, she would tell me stories about the drama, the dashing exploits of the firefighters, and the coffee and doughnuts that she was able to provide to sustain them during their heroic activities.  On weekends, we’d ride our bikes back and forth in front of the Woodlyn firehouse, hoping to be flagged down and chatted up by some of the younger firefighters.  If that failed, we’d ride back and forth in front of the young men’s houses, transistor radios strapped to our handlebars with duct tape.  We got a lot of exercise.

Friendships at school came and went, but Wendy was the constant.  An intercom in her bedroom was connected to an intercom in mine by a long, thin wire strung across the side yard and all along the eaves of her house.  Her room was on the far end of her house, facing, as mine did, the white dome of the observatory on the roof of the junior high school.  At any hour, the battery-powered call button would give its wavering chirp, and Wendy’s voice would crackle through the evergreen tree and over the roof of the Pontiac in the driveway.  “Come over!”

I always did.  Decades later, when my daughter and the girls next door ran a rope and pulley system across the walkway between the houses, sending messages back and forth from her bedroom to theirs, I thought of Wendy, and I smiled.  It’s good to have a friend whose messages you can’t wait to get. 

Cookie

In 1979, my grandmother and my uncle purchased a business.  It had once been a thriving kennel, breeding cocker spaniels and poodles and boarding the hapless pets of even more hapless humans.  At the helm were two elderly sisters.  They were getting along in years, and they were not small, delicate people.  It was no longer easy to clean the floor—even to see the floor beyond their considerable and frighteningly garish housedresses—to see to keep the handwritten ledger books, or even to toss the dead puppies over the fence. My mother’s youngest sibling, Bill, had been employed there in his early teens.  Despite the less-than-appealing elements of the job, he had enjoyed it.  We were close in age, if not in temperament, and we’d spent hours walking along the drainage culvert between his neighborhood and the mall, daydreaming out loud about what life would be like if we had a kennel of our own.

Wishing to help her only son to find his niche in the world, my grandmother moved quickly in response to the news that the massive sisters wished to sell the business. The day we took possession, there were two dogs in the kennel.  I was fifteen, Bill seventeen.  We bounded across the threshold, flush with the pride of ownership.  Well, Bill and my grandmother were owners. I was just an employee, but I was still excited.

The smell just about knocked us back out the door.  Butch the Bassett Hound and Arky the St. Bernard looked hopefully up at us from the urine-soaked linoleum.  Cleaning had not been the ladies’ forte.  The next day was my first in charge of the afternoon kennel shift.  I let the dogs outside into their runs, poured oatmeal-colored cylinders of kibble into the rusty tin feeders, changed the water in their water bowls, and then scooped the outside runs.  Reflexively holding my breath, I stepped back into the building.  It seemed as though it should have taken longer.  What had I forgotten? I stood in front of Arky’s pen and asked him.  He looked down at his feet, and I remembered.  Mopping.  I was supposed to mop the floor!  I knew I had missed something.  I might not be the employee of the year just yet.

Butch was picked up by his happy owners in another week, and they promised to bring him back the next time they went away.  Arky’s owner, it turned out, really didn’t want him any more.  He was huge, well over a hundred pounds, with a long, silky coat, a playful disposition, and jowls dripping with green-tinged slobber. She paid for him to stay with us for another full year, during which his health declined despite our ministrations.  We loved him; he was our silly companion through long days of work and reconstruction. 

It took us a while to renovate the original structure. We started inside, replacing the redolent wood with chain link panels, then ripping up the decaying linoleum. After quite a lot of scrubbing, we slathered the floors with a few coats of marine epoxy paint and hoped for the best.  Before the two new buildings that followed had even been bid, before we had managed to replace the crazy quilt of scrap wood, chicken wire, and chain link that made up the outdoor runs and the yard enclosures, we had a special guest. 

            Cookie was a Maltese, all silky white hair with little black button eyes and nose. Cookie’s family had left her in our capable hands while they vacationed in some delightfully dog-free location.  They had not looked back.  Cookie was not pleased. 

In her view, confinement was confinement, even in a suite as gloriously spacious as the new Steward Kennels had to offer.  Never mind that she had a soft bed, room service, and spacious accommodations indoors and out.  She did not have her family, and she did not have her freedom.  She could not seem to make us understand that the situation was untenable. She decided to demonstrate.

One evening in her outdoor run, Cookie managed to wriggle out from between the wooden fencepost and the slightly bent galvanized gate.  Free from her cell, Cookie looked around to see what was next.  She catapulted herself toward the greenest pastures that she could see, which happened to be the front yard of the house in which I resided (and in which the kennel office was housed).  From across the yard, I saw the flash of white. Adrenaline coursed through me, and I shouted for Bill.  Cookie made short work of the gate into that yard, too, squeezing through before we could get to her.  What she did not know was that there were some maintenance projects long overdue in that yard. 

Bill and I dove through the gate after her as dusk was falling, afraid that she would be harder and harder to find in the tall grass that choked that mostly-untended piece of property. My grandmother lived downstairs, behind the office, and my mother and I lived upstairs.  Bill lived across the driveway, in an apartment he’d painted himself.  This was the explanation for the bathroom being electric lime, the living room gold, and the bedroom midnight blue. You might think that two teenagers, faced with a situation in which our livelihood and reputation was clearly and decidedly on the line, would call for help.  That didn’t really occur to us. The only other people on the premises were our mothers, neither of them experienced in canine retrieval.  We were the dog handlers, and we had better figure something out.

Our own dogs were the only ones who had ever used the yard, and they tended to stay pretty close to the house.  The fence was ancient, rusty, and sagging dangerously in places, held up primarily by the prodigious growth of honeysuckle that had practically swallowed it whole.  Our own dogs had made no attempt to breach the perimeter, so we had no idea how it would stand up to a determined escapee.  Not well, we guessed.

The sound that came next was remarkably clear and distinct. 

Glunk! 

Cookie had discovered something that even we did not know.  She discovered that the ground around the septic tank was somewhat unstable.  If one were a small dog, one could fall in, and one apparently had. 

It was a splashy sound, but splashing in something thicker than water.  It didn't smell all that great, either.  A string of profanity followed from Bill, who had almost fallen in, himself.  He described the situation to me, his voice cracking with tension.  I ran to the garage to find something, anything that might aid in the removal of a dog from a septic situation.

I found one.  I don't know why we had a fishing net, but we did.  I grabbed it and raced back to the edge of the hole. 

            More splashing ensued, and more profanity.  A dog-paddling dog in sewage is not as easy to catch in a net as one might imagine. I stayed a few feet away, ready to try to head her off if she bolted out.  I was afraid to come closer, ashamed for letting Bill do all the work even though he had warned me not to come near the hole.  He wrestled with the net. Finally, in almost full darkness, he pulled her out.  Reaching into the net in relief, he slipped his hand around her collar.

            Our small friend was not all that pleased with this turn of events, or any of the events of the last day or so. Cookie sank her teeth into his hand.  With a surprised bellow, he let go, and she was off.  Like a streak of liquid garbage, she shot across the yard toward the decrepit fence along the road.  We tried to follow, but it was overgrown with weeds and briar bushes, and we lost her. 

            A day went by.  We searched, we called.  WILM and WJBR offered free radio ads for lost dogs, and we ran ads immediately. Finding the dog was more important than not raising eyebrows by broadcasting our failure.  My four-year-old cousin, considered with great confidence by the family to have psychic powers, was consulted.  "Can you see a little white dog near grandma's house?  She's lost, and Uncle Bill is trying to find her." 

He shook his head.  He saw a dog, he said, but it was not white.  It was kind of brown. 

            Well, yes, that very well might be.  Is the dog okay? 

Yes. 

Where is she? 

She's walking down the road near Grandma's.

            I was a little bit sullen about this, because some people though I was pretty darn psychic, too, but it was the only lead we had. We walked up and down that road, and she did not appear.  We sat in the kennel office together until late that night, willing the phone to ring, worried about Cookie and discouraged about the whole business. Losing guests was probably not the shortest road to a reputation as the premier pet hotel in the tri-state area. 

But my cousin might not have been wrong, after all, because the next day, we received a call from the neighborhood just beyond ours.  Someone had Cookie. We called Cookie’s owner to give them the good news. They said that they would prefer to fetch her themselves, and they returned early from their vacation to retrieve one still-stinky but otherwise unhurt dog.    

            We had a cover built for the septic tank, but Cookie’s family never boarded her with us again.  Go figure.

Religious Education

            My cousin Jan was the sixth of seven children in a devoutly Catholic family.  They went to church every Sunday, attended Catholic schools, and did their best to follow the time-honored teachings of the church.  I was envious of the ritualistic conviction with which they did these things, and of the usually-cheerful chaos of a large family.  Jan, I thought, was envious of my apparent life of leisure, free from the restrictions against which she chafed.

            I loved to visit their huge—to me—stone house in Upper Darby.  From the end of their block you could look down the hill to the Philadelphia skyline, just a short trolley ride away.  Their street was shaded by a canopy of ancient trees, and life inside their home felt as solid as the stone with which it was built.

I usually visited on Friday nights, but the year that I was 10 years old, I stayed overnight on a Saturday.  Saturday was bath night and ice cream night.  Jan and I shared the bathtub with some difficulty, as we were both getting long-legged, and I marveled at the angry red line that ran from her shoulder to the base of her spine.  It was made redder with mercurochrome, making it look like the lips of a drunken woman who has recently re-applied her lipstick with less than perfect accuracy.  The injury was a cat scratch, the worst cat scratch I had ever seen.  The previous Saturday night, her younger sister had thought it would be funny—or a pleasant revenge for big-sisterly arrogances—to put the cat into the bathtub with Jan.  The cat had thought otherwise.  The cat had assessed the situation immediately, honing in on the obvious solution: use that girl, there, as a ladder.

It worked just fine.  He did not see what all the fuss was about.  There was screaming and howling and thrashing about, and he made for the gap between the door and the door frame.  By the time Jan’s mother reached the top of the stairs to see which of her daughters had murdered the other, the cat was in brother Daniel’s room, licking the guilt off his paws.   Looking at Jan’s back in the tub gave me occasion to reconsider my wish to have siblings.

On Sunday morning, everyone went to church, because not going to church was a sin. I did own a dress, although it was not exactly subtle and humble.  This was the mid-70's, after all.  It was emerald green polyester, with a wide elastic band of yellow and red stripes around the waist.  We had breakfast: a bowl of Fruity Pebbles cereal and a glass of Tang to drink. I read the explanation of the origins of Tang—supposedly created for the astronauts of NASA—on the bottle while we ate, and felt very space-age.  Neither of these food products were available at my house.

            Ten or fifteen minutes into the service at St. Lawrence's Church, I noticed that everything was starting to sound blurred, somehow.  My vision developed cracks in it, as if the whole world were an ancient, yellowed stained-glass window.  I said something to Jan’s mother about not feeling very well, and she ushered me outside.  No sooner did we get out the door but the Tang and the Fruity Pebbles were immediately dispatched into the shrubbery by forces beyond my control.  I stood, weaving, looking at the colorful result, and Jan volunteered the information that it was a sin to eat before Mass, too. 

            Thank you very much for withholding this vital information. Now you tell me!  In retrospect, I think that rule was about communion, which I did not take because even though I had been baptized Catholic—my mother thought it was all bullshit, but just in case she was wrong, she figured I shouldn't have to suffer for all eternity—I had not done the whole communion training and rehearsal thing.  Still, on this morning I thought that maybe the Blessed Mother didn’t have anything better to do than check her clipboard periodically and punish eaters of unauthorized breakfast cereals.  Or the Holy Ghost. Really, what were his responsibilities, anyway?  It all seemed very unclear. 

            So despite my yearning for union with the unseen, my wish to be enveloped in unconditional love and feel the true path of righteousness under my Converse high-tops, I did not return to a Catholic church for quite some time.

O Little Town

I loved Christmas.  I loved the rich colors of the lights in the darkness, I loved the old-fashioned music, I loved the sense that inexplicably wonderful things had happened before, and might happen again.  Although I never could manage to believe in God, or to give any credence to the Biblical account of Christ’s conception and birth, I could not have been more devoted to the pageantry that surrounded its celebration. 

Each year, on the day after Thanksgiving, I would assemble a small plastic village on an old coffee table on what we called our front porch, a long, narrow room stretching the width of the house.  It also contained a scarred wooden desk, the stereo cabinet and record collection, a coat tree, the telephone, and a rocking chair.  The telephone did not ring much. 

A few months before my tenth birthday, I had begun to set up the village when the fish tank caught my attention.  My father had kept several tanks for a while, Guppies and Mollies and Swordfish, a source of hours of entertainment for the cats.  We didn’t have the cats any more, though.

I peered through the dense green carpet of algae into the tea-brown water.  An ancient crone of a guppy and her friend the angelfish had been living alone together for years, long after the filter and the enthusiasm of their human caretakers had given way.  Eye to eye with the two ancient beings swimming slowly, meditatively, back and forth, I felt a surge of protectiveness.  It seemed in keeping with the Christmas spirit to give them a gift, too. 

I scraped a good chunk of the algae from the front wall of the tank, stirring up a typhoon of fish excrement and plant bits.  The fish hid behind the rock that had been placed in the back of the tank by my father, carted home from one of his trips to the mountains. 

I frowned, observing that the fish’s quarters looked even more unhealthy than they had before I’d begun my mission of mercy.  Walking into the kitchen, I fished around in the cabinet for something with which to scoop water.  I came up with a yellow plastic cup with a smiley face stamped into it in black, along with the words, “Have a nice day.” I didn’t like to drink from it because it smelled so strongly of plastic that it made my Pathmark brand powdered iced tea taste bad.  I figured that being dunked in the fish tank wouldn’t make it any worse.  The other item that I brought back to the porch was the puke bowl.  It was a turquoise tub meant for soaking one’s tired feet, but we used it for situations in which a person might need to vomit suddenly. 

By the time I had filled the bowl twice, each with two dozen cups of smiley brown water, I was tired of this project.  The fish would peek out from behind the rock periodically, looking alarmed.  I filled up the tank with bowls of water from the kitchen faucet—and only spilled a little bit on the way through the dining room and living room—and stood back to look with satisfaction upon my handiwork.  The fish ventured out, their gills heaving, startled by the sudden influx of actual oxygen.  I sprinkled some food on the top of the water, replaced the hood, and turned my attention to Jesus.

The coffee table, tucked into the far end of the room, was shielded from the view of anyone entering or leaving the house.  On this table I set up a little village, complete with a few houses, a picket fence, a gas station, and a church.  In my mind, a gas station was the essential component of a town.  My father was a gas station auto mechanic.  How else would the fathers of the town make their living, if there were no gas station?  There were no factories in Plasticville, which seemed like a major oversight. 

The smell of gasoline and grease that accompanied my father home meant that evening had come.  Later, when he didn’t always come home, I marked the hours by the appearance of certain television shows, a subject on which I was an expert.  Their arrivals were much less likely to be accompanied by unpleasant conversations, fights, or ominous silences than my father’s.

In my coffee-table town, there were some free-standing plastic lampposts, the kind that were reminiscent of gas lights, but the only real illumination came from the church.  The Plasticville church came equipped with a clear C7 bulb on a wire, and a clip that held it upright in the center of the church.  After dinner, I would slip onto the porch, plug in the church, and read my Children’s Bible by its dependable—if somewhat dim—light.  I was determined afresh each year that I was going to read the whole book, cover to cover.  An avid reader, I was certain that I could accomplish this, and I went about it in the most sensible way that I could: by starting at the beginning. 

The problem was that I wanted not just to read it but to memorize it.  I had thought about that myth about the man with the baby calf, who lifted it every day until it became a bull, because if he started when it was small and each day it was only a few pounds heavier, of course he could do it, right?  So, then, surely I could memorize the whole thing without much trouble, if I would just stick to it.

I had a lot of ideas.  Relatively few of them reached any stage that could have been called fruition.  I became very familiar with Genesis, but whatever came after that was a little bit fuzzy.  One year I did get to Joseph and his coat of many colors, and I reflected upon how very much blood was involved in the stories of the Bible.  Admittedly, my children’s version skipped much of the more tedious speechmaking, exposition, and prophesying, focusing on the more colorful stories. 

Still, I was giving it a shot.  Every night I knelt before Plasticville, humming “Silent Night” before settling in to read.  When I’d taken in as much regurgitated revelation as I could stand, I opened the front door and went outside.  Leaning against the American Elm tree by the curb, I considered my house, with its red candles in every window, the string of large outdoor bulbs of all colors ringing the doorway, and a red crinkled-cellophane dime-store wreath in each of the second floor windows. 

Then I would go back inside, put on a scratched 33 rpm record called The Sweet Voices of Christmas, and lean up against the stereo cabinet, the black speaker fabric with gold threads running through it rough against my cheek, listening to British children singing, “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.”

 That was Christmas, for me.  Not the presents, not the relatives, and definitely not Santa Claus.  The thought of a bearded stranger entering our house unannounced always made me uncomfortable.  We didn’t have a fireplace, and before I found out the truth, I worried that he would end up in the furnace.  Even though the idea of him was kind of creepy, I didn’t wish for him to be broiled alive.  I was assured that he used the back door, a flimsy thing with louvered glass and a half-broken lock.  Finding the price tag on that deck of cards on the Christmas just before my fifth birthday set my mind at ease, and my mother’s, too, I think.  She didn’t like to lie to me.

Christmas was about the possible—the light in the darkness, the possibility of finding out that the night fears and the sadness and the unhappy surprises were not all there was.  It was about trying to see the town by the light of the church, although the whole not-believing-in-God-thing was problematic.  I kept trying, but I couldn’t.  It didn’t stop me from appropriating his imagery for my own purposes, and from trying to see the world by the light of my coffee-table altar.  The ancient gilled creatures were my witnesses, remnants of Biblical times, a tiny living presence in the suffocating silence of the house at night.

The next morning, I skipped in to inspect the transformation of ichthyological darkness into light. The guppy was belly-up, and the angelfish was flat on the surface of the water, one eye staring up toward heaven and the other down at the gravel. 

The Dearly Departed Wash Up

Rusty was dead. He was quite thoroughly and completely dead, and his passage to the hereafter appeared to have been marred by a certain amount of thrashing about and the loss of many unpleasant bodily fluids. He was the first thing that I noticed upon my arrival to work that morning.

Ugh.

After a year at the family kennel I had dropped out of high school in order to concentrate on building the premier pet care establishment in the tri-state area.  That didn’t take very long, and so I briefly tried college, driving home on weekends to work in the kennel.  Romantic disaster derailed my academic plan by the middle of spring semester, and from the depths of my heartbreak rose a vision.  Sparkling water, dramatic gorges, beautiful hippies frolicking on the lakeshore, brilliant intellectuals waving from the ivory towers of Cornell.  Ithaca!  I disappeared from college, hitched a trailer to my rusty green pickup truck, and went to seek my fortune.

The job market in Utopia was a little tight, and, strangely, the demand for double-dropouts-hoping-to-reinvent-themselves was not great.  Nevertheless I managed to land a job in a veterinary hospital not far from my lakeshore cabin apartment.  I worked from 6:30 a.m. to 2:30 PM, which left plenty of time to sit on a discarded sofa outside the cabin with my dog, Amiga, contemplating the sunset and counting the pennies I had left after buying groceries and cheap beer.

Certain facets of my job as a veterinary kennelhand and technician were not very glamorous. Okay, maybe none of them were glamorous, but I enjoyed my work most of the time. This particular morning, not so much. I took care of the furry residents who were still in possession of their heartbeats, keeping busy until the vet could arrive and check out the Rusty situation. Cats purred, rambunctious terriers barked, and the ancient German Shepherd hobbled on three legs to the exercise run.

I had finished the basics and was getting ready to give the first water-therapy session to a spinal surgery patient when the vet stuck his head into the therapy room. “Ummmm…” he said, seeming to be searching for the right words.

That was unlike him, so I stopped what I was doing. “Yes?”

 “Ummm…Rusty needs a bath.”

I gave him a minute to see the error of his ways. He was young. Perhaps he’d ingested some recreational substance a bit too late last night. Seconds ticked by, and he wasn’t taking it back. “Alan,” I said, my voice calm and patient, “Rusty is dead.”

He shuffled more fully into the room and looked down at his shoes. “Yeah, I know. His owner wants to pick him up so that they can bury him in the back yard. We can’t send him out like this.”

No, of course not. I knew that. I could not imagine how to begin such a grisly task, though, so I just stared at him. I could see Rusty’s tail and left hind leg from there, deathly still, drenched in vomit, feces, and blood. I thought about the idea that there is a parallel universe for each person, and somewhere perhaps another version of me was lounging on the deck of a cruise ship headed for Havana. Was there a way to choose that reality, like a switch on a railroad track?  I didn’t know how not to imagine how Rusty’s last minutes had felt, and how it would be to be alone when everything is so horribly wrong.

“I’ll help you get him into the tub,” Alan said, and slipped on a rubber apron. We wrestled Rusty, blessedly not terribly stiff, yet, out of his stainless steel cage and onto a metal rack in the tub. Alan disappeared at that point, and I set about bathing the ex-dog.

I talked to Rusty as I worked, at first, trying to keep my revulsion under control. “There are advantages to this method, you know,” I said. “When you were alive, you were pretty much of a handful. Manners were not your long suit. Now, you’re a dream! Left paw up! There, see? It’s up! No resistance at all. Left paw down! Good dog. The only thing I can’t get you to do is roll over. Ready?” I flipped him over on the rack, the unnatural flaccidness simultaneously nauseating and amusing. “Next, leaping through flaming hoops! The Amazing Rusty and his world-famous handler will be touring Europe this spring. Get your tickets early, before the star begins to smell!”

“Umm…how’s it going?” asked Alan, who had reappeared while I was goofing around with the decedent. “Shall I bring you the dryer?”

The dryer? I not only had to wash the thing, I had to dry it? Can I interest you in a cut-‘n-curl? A permanent wave? A manicure? I bit my tongue, lest Alan get any new ideas. “Sure, that would be great.”

Drying him was actually easier than drying the average living dog. I wondered briefly whether there were canine funeral homes, and whether I might consider working in one. I’d never get bitten, never be barked at with the incessant fervor of a West Highland Terrier. It was something to think about. I directed the nozzle at his right ear, and the hair separated in a swirly pattern. “This is not so bad,” I admitted to Rusty, who still had no comment.

When I was finished, the dog was a work of art. No Springer Spaniel in the Westminster Dog Show had ever looked better. His expression was somewhat lackluster, and he was, overall, a tiny bit lethargic, but he looked like a million bucks.

Alan came in with a garbage bag. “Let’s bag him up; they’ll be here in a few minutes.”

I was indignant. “You had me slaving over a hot bathtub and a vomit-soaked dead dog, making him beautiful, and now we’re putting him in a trash bag?”

Alan shook his head and laughed, thinking that I was kidding. I was not kidding, but so be it. I helped to put my cosmetological masterpiece into a trash bag. When his owners arrived, tearful but resolute, Alan carried Rusty out to their car. I did wonder how he felt, the doctor in charge, telling a family that their beloved pet would never bound to greet them at the door again.  People hope that vets, like doctors, can work miracles, and it must be hard to be reminded that skill and knowledge aren’t always enough.

But my job required no miracles, just bleach. I looked over at the pen in which Rusty’s short life had ended, rolled up my sleeves, and got back to work.