When I was a child, my father taught me a trick about how to make yourself wake up at a certain time if you didn’t have an alarm clock handy or even how to remember something you had to do the next morning when you went to bed. He said that what you should do was to picture a blank blackboard, like the kind I knew from school, and then picture yourself picking up a piece of chalk and writing on the blackboard exactly what you wanted to remember the next day. “Try it and see,” he’d said to me, so one night, just before I went to sleep, I conjured up the blackboard and the chalk, but I couldn’t figure out how to picture myself (maybe I was too young to really have a sense of what, or who, I looked like?), so I just imagined the chalk magically appearing in the air and scribbling on the blackboard. What it wrote was that when I’d finished my homework that afternoon, I’d stuck it under the bed. There were many mornings that I couldn’t remember where I had left my hated homework the night before and I found that the trick worked—when I woke up the morning, “homework under the bed,” were the first words that came to mind when I opened my eyes.
Whenever I thought of it, I still used that trick all these years later, maybe because it brought with it fond memories of my father, who had died when I was a teenager after suffering through a long, painful illness. My mother remarried a year after he died, but her new husband wasn’t exactly fond of the wild, angry girl he’d inherited with the long hair, tie-dyed tee-shirt, and huge, ratty, fringed suede shoulder bag I carried with me everywhere (because that’s where I hid my cigarettes and my roach clip). Maybe my father, who I adored, could have cajoled me into behaving more like the nice, middle-class girl I was supposed to be, but grief and anger had already soaked through my skin by the time I had heard the word “hippie” and found its source code on the streets of the East Village, just a short subway ride away from the Bronx, where I had been born, raised, and finally broke free. I left home the day after I graduated high school and I only waited that long because what was left of the sensible girl my father had meant to raise kept whispering in my ear that I’d probably need my diploma if I ever wanted to get a job and be able to support myself.
So even though there was an alarm clock on my nightstand, I still thought of using my father’s trick the other night, just to make sure I woke myself early enough to take my dog to the park in the morning, right after the dog run opened at sixty-thirty. I had only started going this early to avoid the grandmother who had come to stay with my next-door neighbors to help take care of their newborn daughter. My neighbors’ apartment and mine shared a small area separated from the rest of the apartments on our floor by an outdoor walkway, which meant that we sometimes ran into each other right outside each other’s front door. This had never been a problem until the morning that I stepped out of my apartment with my dog at the same time that the grandmother was trying to maneuver a baby carriage out of the apartment next door. Almost immediately, she became hysterical. She grabbed the baby out of the carriage and began screaming that my dog was trying to attack them both. Actually, what he did was to position himself between us and start pushing me back against my door. I thought a heard a low growl in his throat but that was all I heard—just that almost secret sound, like a message meant for me, and what I heard was, Get back. Stay behind me.
Eventually, I managed to get both myself and my dog past the grandmother and down the walkway, heading toward the elevator. That evening, my neighbors, a young couple named Carolyn and Jason, knocked on my door and asked to come in so we could discuss what had happened. As he always did, my dog came with me to the door and when he saw people he knew, he wagged his tail. He liked to have visits from friends, but I knew from the start that this was not going to be a friendly occasion.
“So,” Jason began, “I know we all want to find a way to prevent something like the incident we had this morning. My mother couldn’t stop shaking all day.”
“Well,” I said, “I’m sorry she felt so spooked by my dog. Maybe it would help if I brought him over to your apartment and kind of introduced him to your mother, the way I did when you moved in.”
Jason shook his head. “I don’t think that will help. She’s afraid of dogs to begin with, and you have to admit that your dog is a little intimidating.”
“Actually, I don’t think he is. Just because he’s big…”
“He’s very big,” Carolyn interjected. “As a matter of fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a dog that big and the people who live on the floor right under us have a Great Dane.”
Clearly, we weren’t going to get anywhere with this conversation, so I ended it by offering that it was an unfortunate experience for everyone and I hoped it didn’t happen again. But I knew who they were blaming and it wasn’t Jason’s mother. I understood that they had to defend the grandmother, but I didn’t like it. I was already living for the day that she went home.
As I had reminded my neighbors, I actually had introduced my dog to them when they first moved in because I was aware of the fact that, at nearly a hundred and eighty pounds, he looked like he could even knock over a grown man if that was his intention, but I couldn’t imagine him doing that. He outweighed me by fifty pounds but he always seemed to be careful around me, or people who would stop me in the street to ask if they could pet him. He seemed to like that, but I had noticed that even when he was enjoying himself like this, he tried to keep himself between me and anyone he didn’t know.
I’d just had him for a few weeks when I decided I’d better take him to a vet because I knew practically nothing about him, not even if he had any health issues. In the Queens neighborhood where I lived, there were quite a few veterinarians within walking distance of my building, a tall condominium tower with a doorman downstairs who knew everything about the local businesses and would have been able to recommend a vet to me if I needed his help. I didn’t though, because about fifteen years ago, when I bought one of the condo units in the building, I had a little terrier named Cocoa. When he was twelve, he developed cancer, and the vet who treated him, and who was very kind to me when he died, had an office near my building, so I didn’t even have to think about where I would take my new dog—I took him to James Burden.
“Hello, Jen,” he said, when I walked into the examining room, “it’s nice to see you again. I’m so sorry about Cocoa, though. I know how hard it must have been for you to lose him.”
“It was,” I said, touched that the vet had remembered my little dog’s name. “I didn’t think I could ever get another dog.”
“Well, it looks like you did,” he said, smiling. “He’s quite a change, though, from a ten-pound terrier.”
I sighed. “It’s a long story,” I told him.
Dr. Burden just nodded. “Well, okay,” he said. “What’s this fellow’s name?”
“Rim,” I said, and because the vet started examining the dog without asking anymore questions, I was glad that I didn’t have to explain what had been explained to me, that a child had named the dog after some character in a video game who chased monsters through a wasteland of glass and fire on a distant planet.
Dr. Burden had some other questions, none of which I could answer. How old was he? Had he been vaccinated? Had he ever had any injuries? When it became obvious that I knew absolutely nothing about the dog, I decided that I had to tell Dr. James Burden that whole long story I’d alluded to.
It started when I contracted covid. This was long past the time that the pandemic was over and things had supposedly gone back to normal. However, the covid variants were still infecting people, and when I got sick, my age—I was sixty-seven at the time—made me more than usually susceptible to the symptoms. Just a few days after I took the home test that confirmed I had covid, I woke up one morning and found that I could barely breathe. I went to a nearby urgent care center and they pretty much took just one look at me before they called an ambulance. I ended up being hospitalized for nearly two months, and for the first four or five weeks I was terrified. Oxygen flowed into my body through a plastic mask clamped over my face and I was given heavy doses of antibiotics and antiviral drugs. At night, when I couldn’t sleep and my temperature rose so much that my body felt like it was burning up and then quickly seemed to have plunged into an ice bath, I was sure I was going to die. When I finally began to recover, I was moved from the covid floor, where I had kept in isolation, into a room where there was another woman in the bed next to mine. I felt as fragile as an egg, and I still wasn’t sure that I was going to survive this ordeal. The idea that I’d been in a “geriatric” ward, as I was later told, didn’t help. I had a hard enough time trying to come to grips with how old I was—and how that seemed to have happened overnight—without the hospital imposing the definition of “old lady” on me without even allowing me to complain. Old ladies needed walkers and orthopedic shoes and paid helpers to make them cups of tea. Old ladies died.
In the new hospital room, my roommate was named Christine. We became friendly, as people sometimes do, I guess, when you’re in a hospital and visits from friends and family are curtailed until the doctors are sure that you’re no longer contagious—so the only person you can really talk to is the person in the bed next to you. Christine and I would often talk late into the night. I told her that I had been an office manager at a law firm before I retired, that I’d been married for ten years but divorced after my husband had an affair. That took me a long time to recover from, but it was far in the past now and I thought I was doing well on my own—until I’d gotten sick, of course. Christine told me that that she had one daughter, twenty-three years old, who was living with a boyfriend who beat her up pretty regularly, which was a terrible heartbreak for her.
The night before I was finally going to be released, I was asked to go to the hospital’s financial management office to straighten out an issue with my insurance. I was gone for about half an hour and when I came back, Christine was crying. When I asked what had happened, she told me that her daughter had called to tell her that the night before, her boyfriend had beaten her up so badly that the police were called to her house. She had finally decided to leave him, but the problem was her dog. All the women’s shelters she had called wouldn’t let her bring the dog with her and she was afraid that if she left him at a pet shelter, she’d never see him again. Christine asked me—begged me, actually—to take the dog for a few days until she got out of the hospital and could get him back from me. She swore up and down that there was no one else she could ask.
I didn’t want to do this because I wasn’t sure that I was strong enough to take care of a dog—I didn’t even know if I could take care of myself. When you’ve been as sick as I was for such a long time, and all you do is lay in bed because you’re too weak to move and you even have to perform your normal bodily functions by having someone shoving a bedpan under you, it can be terrifying to think that when the hospital finally sends you home, there will be no one to help you if anything happens—like you get sick again, which is what I suspect any patient whose been in the hospital for a long time believes is going to happen. So, I decided that maybe if I took care of a dog for a few days it would not only take my mind off myself and my problems but also prove to myself that I could return to the normal world where people did things like leave the house by themselves and go shopping or to the park—and maybe even walk a dog. I gave Christine my number and she gave me hers. I also told her my address. She promised she’d call the day she got out of the hospital, which her doctor said would be very soon.
The first afternoon I was back in my apartment, my doorbell rang and a teenager, a girl wearing a black tee shirt and ripped jeans, with her hair in a purple-dyed buzz cut, tattoos on her arms and a silver ring through her lip, showed up at my apartment with the dog. I was quite shocked at how big he was—even his head was big, a long, heavy-looking rectangle with tall, pointed ears restlessly flicking from side to side, listening for whatever was going to be said between myself and this wild-eyed apparition of a girl. When I reached over to touch him, I was surprised by how rough-coated he was. And his fur was an odd color—a dark gray at first sight, but with a black and white undercoat. He also had a huge tail that curved above his back. I had never seen anything like him before.
The girl handed me his leash, and when I at least remembered to ask his name, she told me that story about the child who had named him. Later, when I thought about it, I thought that maybe the child was her, because before she left, she leaned down—only a bit, because again, Rim was a big dog, and with his head raised he was almost as tall as she was—and kissed him. Then she was gone.
“So let me guess,” Dr. Burden broke in. “Christine never called you and when you tried to call her, the line was disconnected. You called the hospital to get her address but because of privacy laws, the hospital wouldn’t give it to you—and that’s how you ended up with this big fellow.”
“Yes,” I replied. “And after a while, it finally dawned on me that there was no abused girlfriend planning to go to a shelter.”
The dog, who had been patiently sitting on the floor, looked up at me and nudged my hand. Either he understood that we were talking about him, or he just wanted to get out of the vet’s office.
“I know that I probably should have taken him to a shelter but I just couldn’t. I didn’t want to believe that I could be that kind of person. Besides…”
“I know,” Dr. Burden said. “You’d become fond of him.”
“I did,” I admitted. “And I didn’t think I could spend the rest of my life wondering what had happened to him.”
“Well, you did a good thing because I’ll tell you what I think is the real story about this dog. I think he was originally going to be used as a ringer in a dog fight, which he very certainly would not have survived.”
I was almost too surprised to speak. “A dog fight? But he’s not vicious. All he does is take walks with me and sleep. I mean, sometimes he kind of pushes me around…”
“That’s because I think this dog is an Anatolian Shepherd. That’s certainly what he looks like, though I can’t imagine where they got him because these dogs are mostly used on farms to protect herds of sheep and goats, even alpacas, from marauders like wolves and coyotes. The breed originated in Turkey—probably around 3,000 years ago, if you can imagine that. The only thing I can think of is that sometimes dog fighting rings will use a dog that looks like this because his size and appearance makes is seem like he’ll be a vicious fighter, but that’s not his nature—unless he’s protecting animals he lives with, and in that case, he’ll fight a whole pack of coyotes by himself if he has to. They must have tried him out, though, because look here,” Dr. Burden said, pointing to some long, black scars on the dog’s flank that I hadn’t paid much attention to. “These are bite marks. Someone must have put him in a ring with a real fighting dog and that’s how he got bitten. But if he didn’t do much about trying to fight back, he wouldn’t even have worked as a bait dog because for the people who like that sort of thing, it’s no fun if the bait doesn’t make it much of a fight.”
“Once they realized he had no value to whoever was running the dog-fighting ring,” Dr. Burden continued,” there were a couple of things they could have done with him. They could have disposed of him, they could have just let him loose in the street somewhere, or they could have taken him to a shelter, but I don’t think they would have gone to the trouble to do that.”
“Which is why that girl got her mother—I mean, I’m guessing Christine was her mother—to tell me that story about the abused daughter and then brought the dog to me,” I said. “She was saving him.” I looked over at Rim, who had now stretched himself out on the floor and closed his eyes. “She must have loved him.”
“Sounds like a movie, doesn’t it?” Dr. Burden said. But of course, it wasn’t a movie. It was a very unexpected development in my otherwise rather quiet life.
That visit to the vet had taken place a few months before my first run-in with the grandmother, but there had beenother incidents since that time. She even acted terrified when she was wheeling the baby carriage down the street and saw me walking my dog half a block away. But this morning, on my way to the dog run, I wasn’t thinking about my neighbors’ grandmother—I was just enjoying the spring weather. The sky was just beginning to brighten, and the air felt silky and light. So, I walked Rim down the quiet streets of my neighborhood and around the edge of a park where butter-colored dandelions and purple chicory grew beside the cobbled pathways. The dog run was just a few blocks further on, and once we reached the gate that opened onto the side of the run reserved for large dogs, I pushed it open, unclipped Rim’s leash, and let him go. There were only two other dogs here, a pair of German shepherds that we often met when we came to the dog run this early in the morning. I nodded to their owner, a woman wearing the kind of tailored dress that meant she worked in a high-end Manhattan office, along with a pair of expensive-looking neon-bright sneakers, and sat down to watch Rim run around. I enjoyed seeing how happy he was to use his long legs and play chase with the other dogs as if he and the shepherds were engaged in some ancient canine version of pursuit.
After the other owner left with her dogs, I stayed on for a while, watching as early morning bike riders began to show up, speeding along the pathways that circled the park. Soon, boys tossing basketballs back and forth headed for the courts nearby and after I watched them for a while, I called Rim to come back to me and we headed home.
When we got back to my apartment—with no sightings of the grandmother, thank goodness—I fed Rim his breakfast, then drank a cup of coffee and ate some toast as I watched him gobble down his food. Then I took a shower and when I came out of the bathroom, he was curled up on the bed, drifting off to dreamland. He was a good sleeper, my dog, so I knew I could leave him alone for a few hours if I wanted to, and today, I did.
After I changed my clothes, I checked on Rim one last time and saw that he was still fast asleep, so I left my apartment and headed off to the subway. From the Forest Hills neighborhood of Queens, where I lived, it was about half an hour ride into Manhattan. I read a book as the train rocketed along through the dark tunnels, emerging every few minutes into the grim yellow light of a station. As the train doors opened, I could hear the electric hum that vibrated in the humid air above the platforms, as if somewhere along the subway line, some broken circuit was generating curls of fire and sparks.
When I had retired from my job as the office manager of a law firm in mid-town Manhattan, I promised myself that I wouldn’t spend my free time just sitting in my apartment watching television or reading a book. Just before Christmas some years ago, a law clerk who had retired a few years past, had come back to join a group of us for lunch. She had talked about how much time she spent reading and then said that she sometimes had a picture in her mind of the city at night with thousands of lighted rooms, and in each room was an aging woman, sitting and reading a book from a huge stack of books that was waiting for her to choose another, and then another, and then another from the pile. I got the message—but even if I hadn’t, I already had a list of things I meant to do when I didn’t have to go to work every day. Of course, getting so sick that I had to be hospitalized for nearly two months, wasn’t on the list.
When I told the vet about being hospitalized, I hadn’t really explained how much that experience had changed me. I felt very different than the person I’d been before nearly dying from covid. I felt deflated, like I’d lost a great deal of confidence in myself and wasn’t sure anymore who I really was. I felt weak, mentally and physically, and I still had those feelings, but I was trying to fight them. I was doing my best to make sure I didn’t become one of those women who were content—or frightened enough of encroaching age and illness—to sit in their apartment and rarely go out.
So today, I had made a plan to be out for the day, which was why I was on the subway: I was on my way to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I got off the train on 86th street and walked along the boundary of Central Park West until I reached the massive cascade of stone steps leading up from Fifth Avenue to the museum’s grand entrance. My intention was to visit an exhibition the museum had just opened featuring pieces of Egyptian art and statuary that explored the connection between humans and gods. When I was in elementary school in the Bronx, the most exciting part of the school year was when we all boarded a bus and were driven into Manhattan to visit the museum. It was the Egyptian wing with the mummies in their tombs and the painted walls of hieroglyphics that had impressed me the most, and I was really looking forward to seeing them again, along with the new pieces that were only going to be on display for a short while.
The Egyptian wing of the museum was on the first floor, but as I approached the entrance to the galleries I saw there were so many people lined up to enter the exhibit that it was clearly going to be a long wait to get in. I was disappointed, but the museum is enormous, so I examined a map on the wall and decided that I would visit the galleries that housed the museum’s collection of Italian Renaissance paintings. That wasn’t because I had a particular fondness for those paintings—in fact, I knew nothing about them—but on a different school trip to the museum we had been herded through that gallery on our way to the museum’s display of Medieval weapons and armory that the boys in our class had been clamoring to see.
Now, as I walked through room after room of paintings depicting saints, martyrs, Madonnas, and crucifixions, I found myself suddenly stopping short in front of a huge painting of St. Francis of Assisi. He was sitting on a rock in a grove of tall, leafy trees, and was surrounded by all kinds of animals. I could pick out lambs, goats, rabbits, geese—even a wolf. A dove was perched on one of the saint’s shoulders and a swallow stood on the other. But there was also another bird, a huge, black raven with dark, black eyes and a sharp beak sitting on a branch just above the placid scene. I remembered that when I first saw this painting as a schoolchild, the raven frightened me. He looked angry, like he was furious about being stuck in that apple tree and was getting ready to fly down and peck out St. Francis’ eyes—or mine, if I didn’t hurry away, which is exactly what I did.
Now, as I stopped here to look at the raven, wondering if he would still seem as scary to me, I saw that a detail of the painting showing only the huge black bird on his branch had been reproduced on a panel hanging beside the much-larger picture. A label above the smaller image explained that the side panel had been selected to point out the process that had been used to paint sections of the larger image, particularly the raven. It was thought that the painter had been a student of Leonardo Da Vinci himself and had used a method that Da Vinci had employed to paint the Mona Lisa and one or two of the few other paintings he’d completed in his lifetime. The method was called stumato, and it involved applying many thin layers of paint, perhaps as many as forty different layers—over many weeks.
I hadn’t seen that panel when I was on that school trip, if it had even been there at that time. But now, as I studied the raven, he didn’t look particularly frightening to me. Now, he just had a kind of knowing look in his eye, like after absorbing layer after layer of paint, he understood something about patience, at least. About forbearance, and he was ready to challenge anyone who thought any different.
When I finally turned away from the raven, I checked back at the Egyptian wing and found that the crowds had thinned out some, so I was able to enter the gallery and spend the rest of the afternoon looking at golden statues and fragments of papyri depicting gods with kohl-rimmed eyes. Then I went downstairs, to the basement rooms of the museum, where there was a gift shop. When I was a schoolchild, this was my favorite part of the trip because my mother had given me a few dollars to buy a souvenir. I don’t remember what I bought all those years ago, but today, I was hoping to find a postcard with a picture of the raven, but neither St. Francis nor the detail of the raven was anywhere to be found.
When I got home that afternoon, Rim was waiting at the door and jumped up to put his paws on my shoulder—that’s how tall he was. And solid. I had to be careful not to let him accidentally push me over. When he calmed down a bit, I put on his leash and took him out for a walk. He loped along, stopping to sniff at the secret scents that he could detect on the ground and in the air. I think he had worked out that he was a good deal stronger than me, so he didn’t pull on the leash much, but when he did, he would immediately stop when I told him to. I had the feeling he had figured out a lot of other things about me but those were his secrets, as well.
When we got back to my apartment, I fed Rim his dinner and heated up some leftovers for myself. When we were both done, I led him out on the terrace. I lived on a high floor in this building and could see all the way to a park a few miles from here where the Unisphere, a huge steel globe representing the earth, stood at the end of an avenue of linden trees. My dog was lying beside my chair, half asleep.
Suddenly, the door of the terrace next to mine, which belonged to my neighbors, opened and then immediately slammed shut. I could see this because our pair of terraces were separated only by a decorative metal barrier a few feet tall so that when we were sitting on our terraces at the same time, we were always in full view of each other. This evening, after the door to the neighboring terrace was closed, I could hear a lot of yelling going on next door. It continued for maybe ten or fifteen minutes and then stopped. I was glad that my neighbors had quieted down, and I went back to enjoying the evening as the light around me changed from a silvery yellow to a deep blue. Soon, the stars began to appear and a thin, incandescent slice of the crescent moon rose on the horizon.
Eventually, it became too chilly to sit outside any longer, so I opened the terrace door and followed my dog back inside. I realized that there were times when he seemed to be making choices about whether to lead me around or follow behind me. Ever since the vet had told me that Rim had been bred to guard a herd, my guess was that he worried about the fact that I was alone, without my herd of companion animals, so it was his job to figure out how best to keep me safe.
Around eight o’clock, when I was watching tv, someone knocked on my door. I got up from the couch, went to the door to look through the peephole, and saw that my neighbor, Jason, was standing in the hall.
“Can I talk to you?” he asked, after I opened the door.
“Sure,” I said. “Come on in.”
I led him into the living room where we sat down on opposite ends of my couch. “Okay,” I said, “what’s up?”
“I want to talk to you about the terrace,” he said.
And suddenly, I knew. Soft, wavy lines of sound came drifting through my mind and quickly, they grew louder. They said: The argument I heard when I was sitting on the terrace earlier was about me. It was about Rim sitting on the terrace.
I was right. “I know this is a little difficult,” Jason said, “but my mother wanted to take the baby out on the terrace earlier, but she was afraid to. She was sure that your dog was going to jump over the barrier and attack the baby.”
“You know that’s ridiculous,” I told Jason.
“No I don’t,” he said. “I don’t know anything about that dog. What if it turns out that he really is dangerous? What if you can’t control him when he gets some idea in his head—like to jump the barrier on the terrace?” He laughed, but it was an unpleasant sound. “Never mind jump. He could probably just step over the barrier.”
Jason was trying to sound outraged as he said all this but actually, I thought he looked embarrassed. His mother had obviously sent him on this errand—to do something about the dangerous dog that lived next door—and he wasn’t happy about it.
“Well, what do you want to do about this?” I asked. “I’m probably going to be using the terrace a lot more now that the weather has gotten warmer, and I’m sure that most of the time—if not all the time—the dog is going to be with me.”
“So, here’s the thing,” Jason replied. “I thought that we could work out a schedule. You could use the terrace at certain times, and we—my mother—could use it at other times. She’s going to be staying with us longer than we first planned because Carolyn has to get back to work soon and we can’t find child care that we feel comfortable with. So…”
“So she may actually come to live with you permanently,” I said. “Is that what you’re telling me?”
“Not permanently but…well, so far we haven’t figure that out yet.”
“But you have figured out that you want me to use my terrace only on a particular schedule?”
“You don’t have to make it sound so restrictive.”
“But it is.”
I could see the look on Jason’s face begin to change. He wasn’t embarrassed anymore—he was getting angry. He probably thought that I was such a nice woman—maybe even a sad, lonely woman living alone who was glad that anyone was paying any kind of attention to her—that of course, I’d agree to whatever was asked of me. But I didn’t.
“No,” I said.
“No” Jason repeated. “Just like that? You won’t even think about it?”
I may have surprised myself a little by being so belligerent because usually, I did try to get along with people. I had learned that lesson at my job, when I had to deal with an office-full of expensive lawyers working under intense pressure and when they asked for something, they expected that it would materialize in front of them immediately, if not sooner. It was my job to make sure that everything I was in charge of—and even things I wasn’t—made their lives easier. No matter how much I smiled and soothed, there were still times when someone got angry at me, but I never responded in kind. I just fixed whatever the problem was and then went on to the next thing. So where did this immediate refusal to cooperate with Jason come from? I had no idea, but suddenly, I was seething.
“It’s a stupid idea,” I said. “I live here. This is my apartment and I am going to use the terrace whenever I like, and that includes having my dog with me.”
Jason stood up and looked around my living room, as if he might discover some reason that the nice woman next door was being so unreasonable. “Look, Jen,” he said, trying a more conciliatory approach, “we have to find a way to work this out.”
“That’s completely up to you,” I told him. “I’m not going to live my life worrying about your mother’s feelings.”
“So much for being a good neighbor, right? I guess your preference is for being a cunt.”
Jason stood up then, as if he meant to leave, but he didn’t move. I stood up and faced him, but I didn’t say anything more.
All this time, Rim had been stretched out next to me, on the floor. His eyes were closed as if he was asleep, but I had seen his ears twitching, so I knew he was listening. He probably understood the sound of normal conversation but as soon as voices were raised, he knew what that meant, too, and maybe there was something in that last thing Jason said that raised an alarm deep in my dog’s devotion to protecting his lonely herd because he was suddenly on his feet. He didn’t bark, he didn’t do anything threatening—he just positioned himself between Jason and me and began gently pushing me backwards, away from what he perceived as imminent danger.
Jason was so angry now that he didn’t even seem to notice what Rim was doing. “This isn’t over,” he said as he turned and headed for the front door. “Not by a long shot.”
After he left, I sat back down on the couch and Rim jumped up to lay beside me. He put his head in my lap—a weight that felt like a block of marble. I couldn’t stop thinking about my behavior because since the day I left the hospital, I had gone out of my way to avoid any kind of confrontation. Now, after the fact, I felt a little queasy. Just about the last thing I wanted was to be in a situation where the people I lived next door to were angry with me, but that’s exactly where I was.
That night, in bed, just at the edge of sleep, I thought I heard the sharp, knife-point sound of high-heeled shoes stabbing at the floor in the apartment upstairs. But it was a ghost sound—it wasn’t really there. Almost immediately, though, I knew what it was: When I was a child, my father—the man who had taught me the trick of making sure you got up exactly when you needed to—worked in the city’s garment center cutting bolts of cloth into the pieces needed to assemble women’s coats. He had to be up at five a.m., which is why he knew that trick about making himself get up at exactly the right time. But that was the good side of his nighttime routine—the bad side was that our upstairs neighbors were a couple who often went out at night and when they came home, usually well after midnight, the woman would never take off her high-heeled pumps. She would walk around her apartment with the heels of her evening shoes piercing the quiet of the night. Once or twice, my father had gone upstairs to talk to his neighbor about her behavior, but she simply would not stop walking around in her knife-point heels. She did what she wanted—everyone else be damned, and my father, a shy kind of man, was too timid to ever confront her again.
It wasn’t as if I thought her behavior was excusable in any way—it wasn’t, and it brought back sad memories about how bad I’d felt for my father back then. But at this time in my life, when I was the person who was supposed to give in, I just wasn’t going to do it. Maybe a nicer woman would have—a kindly old lady—but she had probably died in the hospital and she wasn’t coming back.
But by the next morning, my feeling of self-righteousness was gone. Every time I ran into the grandmother and the baby, I didn’t want to feel like a woman in high heels keeping a man with few options awake all night. The idea of making any kind of change in his life was unthinkable to my father. Except for the intractable neighbor, he had found a place that suited him and he was afraid that there would never be another. Years after he died my aunt—my father’s sister—told me that my mother had begged him to move someplace else, but he was afraid to. Afraid of what? I had asked my aunt, but she said she didn’t know.
When I got up the next morning, I decided to take Rim to the dog park even earlier than usual because I didn’t want to miss the woman with the German shepherds, and luckily, she was there. I sat down on the bench beside her and asked about the building where she lived. She told me that it was a new construction, a beautiful high-rise condominium, and she was sure there were still units available, if I was looking for one. I said that I might be. And then, pointing to her dogs, the two big shepherds who were now playing some sort of mad running game with Rim, she laughed and said that obviously, it was also completely dog friendly.
I thanked her and then we sat together for a while, chatting about nothing in particular. Overhead, the moon was just leaving the sky, changing places with the rising sun. When it seemed that the dogs had finally tired themselves out, we called them back to us and then Rim and I went on our way.
We walked through the park, though the morning mist, where layers of light and layers of clouds, thin and transparent as the touch of a paintbrush, turned the morning into portrait hung upon the sky. Birds began singing. Birds with their frail little lives and a knowing look in their eyes, took wing and flew away. And as I crossed the busy street at the edge of the park—a dangerous crossing, where you had to be careful to look for oncoming cars—I saw that my dog was walking behind me. He seemed to have decided that at least this once, it was safe to let me lead the way.