Who let the dogs in . . .? I’ve written maybe thirty short stories before the last one refused to quit and turned itself into my novel, An Invitation to the Party. I don’t think there’s a single one that doesn’t have at least one resident canine. I attribute it to the library books I carted home in grammar school, week after week, in the 1950’s: Lad a Dog, Old Yeller, Big Red, White Fang, Call of the Wild. If there was a dog on the cover, I was going to read it. I never decided every story I wrote needed its own dog(s). It was just that at some point in each one, the scratching at the door would begin, the whining would start, the pitiful whimpers. Sometimes I’d try to hold off as long as I could. But in the end, it was I, I always let the dogs in.
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#6 Some thoughts about dialogue . . . (Brought to you this week by Tootsie, who is a fan of spoken interrogative dialogue, i.e. "Who's a good girl?" "Time to eat?" "Go for a walk?")
Word’s corrective proclivities are realistic dialogue’s enemy. Word wants me to use complete sentences, proper grammar and correct spelling, but people, even highly educated people not to mention the rest of us, do not speak thus. We utter incomplete thoughts and insist on saying ain’t, we elide, employ slang, misuse infinitives and gerunds, use the wrong tense, and hurl expletives. We are incorrigibly incorrect in spoken communication. I turn edit and spellcheck off when writing dialogue and so should you. I often use my phone’s recording app to read aloud what I’ve written. Both the act of reading out loud and subsequently listening to the result are invaluable means of measuring whether your dialogue sounds realistic. Unlike silently reading your words on the page, aloud, you can hear immediately when a passage sounds off. In writing dialogue, the adverb is never your friend. If you have to tell your reader that your character is speaking “ruefully,” “sarcastically,” “sadly,” “ironically,” etc. (apropos of nothing, I can’t listen to Alanis Morissette’s song, “Isn’t It Ironic?” without greeting each of her examples with a “Sorry, no, it’s not!), then your dialogue is not doing its job. On the other hand, all rules are made to be broken. The tricky part is knowing that it is a rule and that you are breaking it. There are many ways to write a story. Some very good writers begin by listing their characters, plotting out events and planning the arc of the story before they begin writing. They already know how it ends, and their writing is a journey to a known destination. My problem is that by the time I did all that, being very easily distracted, I’d have lost interest and the story would never get written. Usually what happens is that a character saunters in and begins to talk to me. As I begin to write, I notice others have joined her (let’s say “her”). Those others almost always include a dog or three, and though they don’t usually talk, they too definitely communicate their wishes story-wise. And my story begins to take shape. Despite the lack of pre-planning, occasionally as I write, the ending becomes clear long before I'm finished. Almost always, this is not a good thing. It is usually the last conclusion I would have chosen. Unfortunately, it is almost always the right thing for the story. Sometimes, as in the story below, I push back, but always, thus far, to no avail. In “Lost,” which you are about to read I went so far as to write an alternate ending. It did no good. It is not only the heart that wants what it wants. Sometimes the story does too. Here is my story "Lost." The alternate ending follows it. Lost by MJ Werthman White It’s not as if the morning didn’t start out just fine with Ava, his personal canine alarm clock, nudging him with her big nose just as darkness gave way to first light. Nick had pulled on his jeans and followed her downstairs, through the kitchen, letting her out the back door into the yard. There, despite his bare feet, he’d stood a moment on the cold cement of the step watching her. When the chill sent him inside and upstairs to shower and dress, Ava was poking through the first few bright fallen leaves (I’ll be raking by the weekend, he remembered thinking) following the scent of one or another of the squirrels that populated a stand of maples separating his aunt’s lot from the bikeway behind it, “When was the last time you saw her?” his aunt asks. “When I let her out.” Nick takes the yellow mug of freshly brewed coffee she offers. “When I went to get the paper, she was gone. I’ve been around the block three times calling for her.” His first reaction on seeing the empty yard, and the only female that still unreservedly loves him gone, had been a childish it’s not fair. It felt once again to Nick like the last few years’ losses: his younger sister, Steffi, his marriage, and now Ava, far outnumbered everything else. Of course, there was also the fact of his turning fifty last January, with its attendant realization that only if Nick lived to a hundred could he any longer call himself middle-aged. In fact, the only feeble ray of light has been the woman standing in front of him. After it became apparent things weren’t ever going to work out with Natasha, his seventy-three-year-old Aunt Anne invited both him and Ava to move in. He suspects she may like the company as much as he does. “She uses her nose to lift the latch on the gate,” his aunt is saying. “This is the second time this week.” “I know. I was going to do something about it this weekend.” “She can’t have gone far; it’s only been forty-five minutes.” “You do realize Ava will follow anyone who gives her a bite of his Egg McMuffin.” “Or jelly donut or green bean salad for that matter,” Anne says. “But aside from you, Nick, who wants a fixed Great Dane with arthritis and a not terribly successful hip replacement?” Nick is willing to concede that Ava is not your usual candidate for the she-followed-me-home-ma-can-I-keep-her? scenario. His dog has simply wandered off. Again. She’ll be back. Why do these facts today feel to Nick like a kind of whistling in the dark? “I’ll ask the neighbors if they saw anything,” Anne says and sighs. Nick notes the sigh. This woman, his father’s sister, has been watching out for him one way or another since he was fifteen and his own mother left. It’s possible she’s getting tired of a job he knows has not been particularly rewarding. “It’ll be fine,” she says. “Go. You’ll be late for work.” For the first time in his adult life Nick is someone else’s employee. Selling the funeral home, founded three generations ago by his grandfather, to a large conglomerate last year angered and appalled his extended family. That is until Nick cut the hefty checks that constituted their shares of this desecration of birthright. He’d started looking for a buyer soon after his sister died. No way would his daughter, Olivia, through some misguided sense of duty, wind up being responsible for closing a casket on a member of her own family. No way was she ever going to come to the realization that, more and more, the people whose bodies she prepared for their last, long journeys were people she not only knew, but ones she loved, each additional death, and he knows he’s no longer talking about his daughter here, another blow to a heart not that strong to begin with. So Nick now has regular hours managing a no-longer-his funeral home for, not incidentally, an additional quite nice chunk of change. Too bad he has neither family nor girlfriend to spend it on, apart from the obligatory monthly support check to his soon-to-be-ex-wife, Jane. “Don’t forget to call the pound,” Nick tells Anne. “Go,” she says again. “I’ll call them all.” Twice during the morning Nick drives the village streets. At lunch he walks the bikeway near Anne’s house calling Ava’s name. Around one the phone rings. It’s Jane. Although he’s the one who walked out, Nick still finds himself dismayed by the faint air of relief he detects in her voice every time he talks to her. “I’ve just spoken to Anne,” Jane says. “Ava’s back,” he says, relieved. A loop of pictures has been repeating in his head all morning, Ava hit, by the side of the road, Ava in a car a hundred miles away, Ava abandoned, picking through trash behind some big-city Arby’s. “No, Nick, and she’s not at the shelter either. I wish you’d left her here with us. Ava’s an old girl and doesn’t like change. I think she’s trying to come home when she gets out.” “Home is with me, Jane. Besides Ava’s not old, she’s only eight.” “She’s no spring chicken and you know it, Nick. Eight is old for a big dog.” “You called to tell me that?” But Nick knows Jane is, as usual, right. Jane is always right; Nick wonders if that’s one reason he left her for Natasha. Smart and funny, Natasha was also endearingly wrong about almost everything-the balance in her checking account, time, dates, directions; she couldn’t even tie her sneakers properly, laboriously making two loops, knotting them together into a tortured-looking bow that almost immediately unraveled-endearing right up to the moment she decided her feelings for him had also been a mistake. “I called," Jane says, "to tell you your daughter stayed home this morning to put together a flyer for you. She’ll have copies made after school and drop them off.” “Without saying a word to her father, no doubt,” Nick says. His sixteen-year-old-daughter, Olivia, hasn’t spoken to him since he left, seven long months of stony silences, hang-ups and slammed doors. Hard to believe, Nick thinks, but in yesterday’s paper his horoscope read: “Your charm ensures you are universally loved. Use it wisely.” An hour later the phone rings again. “Nicky?” The voice is soft and breathy. Both in looks and speech, Natasha reminds him of the actress Meg Tilly. She is twenty-two years younger than he is. “Natasha,” he says as the wind whistles across the barren steppes of his mind leaving him unable to think of a single thing else to add. “I heard about Ava. I’m so sorry.” The speed at which news travels in this little town never ceases to amaze him though he was born and raised here. Then again, last spring it didn’t take very long for Jane to get wind of what was going on either. “I hope you find her,” Natasha says. “I just wanted you to know.” She too hangs up before he has a chance to say good-by. Though he is not without regret for its cost to his family, going to bed with Natasha in April was the first time since his sister died he’d felt like a human being, that he’d felt much of anything at all. Sex with Natasha-and if he’s honest that’s what it was, love was not part of the equation for either one of them-the faint strawberry taste of her lipstick when they kissed, her scent, his heart beating wildly in his chest, the harsh sound of his breathing, all of it helped make the awful numbness he felt begin to subside. She was the one person who managed to comfort him, perhaps because she didn’t try, and in fact seemed unaware any such need existed. Maybe it was the age difference. It’s Nick’s opinion that young people think everyone is (or should be) as resilient as they are. It’s nearly four-thirty when his daughter turns into the circular drive, in front of the funeral home. He finds it difficult to wrap his mind around the fact Olivia is driving, got her permit, passed the test and picked up her license, all without him. He also tries not to think about the fact that somehow he’s managed to pull the same stunt on his daughter his own mother pulled on him, and at almost the same age. The question now is whether Olivia will spend the next twenty years mad at Nick. Karma-wise it would seem only fair. Things are slow this afternoon, no viewings scheduled until this evening, Ed Cottrell, in his navy-blue pinstripe and rep tie is already in the Lilac Room good to go. Mrs. Baylor is downstairs getting her nails done and a blue rinse, per her daughter’s instructions, from Marsha. Her debut isn’t until tomorrow so she’ll spend the night in the cooler. Marsha wears her white hair in a crew cut and favors tailored pants suits when she’s working upstairs, flannel shirts, work boots and jeans when she’s not. Nick has never felt the need to discuss her sexual orientation and she has never inquired about his. After his sister was killed in the crash and they got her body, or what was left after the resulting fire finished with it, he’d asked his aunt to do some shopping for him, both knowing there’d be no viewing. Then he’d dressed Steffi for eternity in the soft pink flannel pjs and matching bunny slippers Anne brought him. He covered her with one of their grandmother’s handmade quilts. Marsha came in just as he was tucking in the newest Evanovich hardback along with Steffi’s reading glasses. He took one look at Marsha, sat down hard on the cement floor and lost it. She knelt down on the floor and held him, crying with him until they both managed to regain some measure of composure. She’d have hated it that he guessed she’d had more than a little crush on Steffi. Afterwards Marsha said,” You did the right thing, Nick. Steffi would have been really pissed if you hadn’t given her something decent to read.” Nick walks out to the front hall just in time to surprise Olivia leaving a stack of posters on a cherry demi-lune table. “Thank you,” he says. Olivia fixes him with a dark look. She is the spitting image of her beautiful grandmother, his mother. He wonders if she’ll speak or simply turn on her heel and go. “Any news?” she finally asks. There’s no Dad, Daddy, or even the more formal Father, appended. “No, nothing.” “How could you leave the gate open?” That you; it’s uncanny how much she sounds like Jane. “I didn’t do any such thing.” “Ava opened it herself?” “Actually, yes, she did,” Nick says. “On the plus side, she has a collar, license and ID tag.” “You didn’t spring for a chip?” This conversation is going nowhere, "Let’s see what you’ve got there,” Nick says. Olivia hands him one of the flyers. It has two full-color snapshots of Ava, the largest a head shot of her with a wreath of holly around her neck tied with a big red ribbon, taken at a Christmas pet shoot last December, a photo Nick remembers as constituting their last Christmas card as a nuclear-he finds that such an interesting word choice, ominous, full of potential for widespread and irreversible destruction-family. The other shows Ava, ears pricked, looking flirtatiously askance at the camera, though the effect is more equine than canine. “How many did you have made?” he asks. “Thirty,” Olivia says. “Ouch. That must have set you back a couple weeks’ allowance.” Nick reaches for his wallet. “I told Copy Station to bill you. And I don’t get an allowance anymore.” “No?” Nick asks. “I have a job,” Olivia says. She has a job? Nick feels a pain in his gut. He begins to read aloud: AVA Family PET!!!!! Have YOU seen this dog? REWARD!!!!!! for her safe return – NO questions asked Anne’s phone number and that of his former home are listed below. “Reward?” Nick says, “What kind of reward?” Olivia gives him a withering look. It amazes Nick that this young woman used to be crazy about him. “At least help me put them up.” Nick says. They spend the next hour papering their small town under a flawless, upside-down blue bowl of an October sky, the leaves on the trees seeming to incandesce before their very eyes. “What a beautiful day,” he says to his daughter. Olivia doesn’t answer. They use duct tape or a staple gun depending on the surface. There’s no more small talk, in fact precious little talk of any kind. When the last poster has been affixed to the community bulletin board at the village offices, Nick says, “You do know your aunt will have my head if I don’t at least bring you by to say hi.” Nick arrives at Anne’s house first. As he pulls into the driveway, his aunt comes out onto the porch and walks down the steps in his direction. He parks and gets out. “What?” he says. “Animal Control just called. They’ve picked up a female Great Dane.” “Ava?” “No collar. No tags. She’s badly hurt and needs surgery. They’ll have to euthanize her unless they hear from you.” She hands him a slip of paper with a phone number scribbled on it. “How many stray, female Great Danes can there be in one small town? Of course, it’s Ava.” Nick takes out his cell phone. Olivia, who’s joined them, waits for him to finish the call, “I’ll drive you,” she says. It turns out that the answer to Nick’s question is “Two.” When the veterinarian beckons Nick and Olivia into the recovery room, the bandaged, now three-legged animal, for whom Nick has assumed all financial responsibility is not Ava. “We had to amputate. We had no choice,” the vet says. “Where did you find her?” Nick asks. “On the side of 250. Someone thought she was a deer and called the sheriff. She’s very thin; she’s been on her own for a while.” A few days later, Nick takes the dog home after first dedicating most of the available credit on his Visa to paying her bill. Olivia, who’s called each day to check on the dog’s progress, asked to go with him. As if he could, would, refuse. There have been no other calls despite the posters, no sign of Ava. “What will you name her?” Olivia asks from the back of the car where they’ve folded the seats down; she’s sitting cross-legged on a blanket, the dog’s head in her lap. “Bella?” Nick offers. “Yes,” Olivia says and smiles up at the rearview mirror. Nick has never before in the same instant felt so sad and so happy. Over the next weeks, his daughter takes as her personal mission the care and feeding of Bella. At the house, Olivia’s conversations with Anne are easy and affectionate, his aunt obviously pleased to be seeing more of her so recently estranged grandniece. Those with her father are formal and somewhat stilted but he happily takes what he can get. Bella figures out how to climb the stairs and sleeps on the floor next to Nick’s bed. She turns out to be a sweet and grateful dog but smaller, quieter, less personable, no Ava. The posters yellow and tatter much like Nick’s hopes. Finally, he spends a Saturday morning with Olivia taking them all down. When they’re finished his daughter is in tears but, her mother’s child, nonetheless able to insist that everything they’ve collected be bundled and ready for Monday’s recycling pick-up. The leaves drop, covering Anne’s wooded lot so thickly the grass is hardly visible. Nick rakes them to the curb and on the appointed day the village picks them up. The first snow falls and almost immediately melts. And Anne announces she is having Thanksgiving dinner. The group that gathers is not large, Jane, Olivia, Nick, Anne and a hopeful Bella. Anne seats Nick at the head of the table. From his vantage point he sees a small group of survivors: here, alive, but each missing something of value. A leg, a wife, a husband, a sister, a dog, a small happy family that in truth may never have actually existed. After the turkey is carved and served but before they eat, the four clasp hands. Anne begins, “We are thankful for family.” “And for Bella,” Olivia says, handing the delighted dog a surreptitious piece of bird under the table. "I saw that,” Jane says. “You know turkey is not good for a dog, Olivia. All those sharp bones.” Almost as an afterthought she adds, “For food and shelter.” Nick goes last. Bella’s head rests heavily on his foot as he begins to speak. He knows she waits patiently, confidently, trusting, despite her considerable experience to the contrary, that good things will come her way in the fullness of time. “That what’s lost may one day be found,” he says. “Amen.” He’s not only talking about Ava; he is talking about the love he once felt for his wife, about his daughter’s feelings for him, and about the places in each heart absence has left empty. Nick voices this desire even though it is also increasingly clear to him that what is found, when, if, it’s found, is never exactly what was lost. He wonders if maybe that’s enough, if it has to be enough that grace may be stumbled upon, unearned. “Amen,” his family, such as it is, echoes. That night, Nick dreams of Ava. She bounds toward him across a meadow of tall grass followed by two noisy, laughing children. It is high summer. There’s a big red barn and farmhouse in the background. A woman is hanging sheets out to dry and they flap noisily in the warm wind. Later when Nick awakens, he tries to recall the dream but is able to remember only fragments-the color red, a field of wildflowers, children’s voices, a dog barking-of what it was that left his face wet with tears. And here is the alternate ending. (Which ending would you have chosen?) (The alternate (happy) ending I had to write before I could stand to do the one you just read.) Nick arrives first. As he pulls into the driveway, his aunt comes out onto the porch and walks down the steps towards the car. He doesn’t want to hear what she has to say. “I’ve called everywhere,” Anne says. “I kept missing you. So help me I’m going to buy you a cell phone if you won’t get one for yourself.” Nick is the last holdout among all the people he knows. He hates the damn things, going off around him like small incendiaries of rudeness. He borrows Marsha’s when work necessitates he be reached on the fly. “What?” he asks. He doesn’t want to know; what he really wants to do is stick his fingers in his ears, close his eyes and go la-la-la-la. “Ellen Giambrone called this afternoon." “Joey’s mother?” The Giambrone’s are Anne’s next-door neighbors. Joey is enamored of Ava. In fact, his mother has begun adding an extra sandwich to his lunch because she found out Joey was feeding his to Ava every morning on the way to school. Needless to say, for Ava, the feeling is mutual. Olivia has parked on the street and joins them in the front yard. “Joey took Ava to school today for show and tell. She spent the day in kindergarten," Anne tells them both. “Ellen didn’t find out about it until he got home with Ava in tow.” Nick is giddy with relief. “She asked me to call when you got back so Joey could bring Ava over and apologize.” Ava is very happy to be home where she belongs. First, she goes and leans against Nick and then against Anne and finally stays with Olivia who puts her arms around the dog and hugs her. These two are almost like siblings. There’s none of that frisson of rivalry, the undercurrent of jealousy that Nick always noticed when Ava and Natasha were together and he was around, both of them eyeing, taking the measure of the other. “I’m sorry, Mr. Fugate,” Joey says, kicking at the ground with a sneakered foot. His mother stands behind him, hands on his shoulders. “We were very worried, Joey,” Nick says. Tears begin to leak out of Joey’s eyes and run down his cheeks. Great, Nick thinks. Now I’m making five-year-olds cry. “Next time, you’ll tell us when you want to take Ava?” Joey nods his head and looks down. His brown hair flops forward over his reddened eyes. At least, Nick thinks, I won’t have to shell out reward money to some miscreant dog thief. “Dad,” Olivia says. Nick looks at his daughter, that word a kind of music. “Dad,” she repeats a little louder. “Joey did return Ava to us safely.” She explains to Joey’s mom about the posters and the reward. “Absolutely, not!” Joey’s mother says when Olivia has finished. Nick watches as Olivia resumes talking to Mrs. Giambrone. When she’s through, Joey has a college fund with five hundred dollars of Nick’s money soon to be deposited in it. Nick feels like he did the first time he went to court and watched his sister argue a case. He’s oddly comforted. Steffi never married, never had kids, but he knows somehow there’s a little bit of her, maybe more than a little bit, in her niece, his daughter. It feels as though someone he’s missed terribly has just paid a visit. Five of us, no six, Nick thinks, together here on the leaf-littered grass of an October afternoon the week before Halloween, surrounded by ghosts. “We have to take down the posters,” Olivia says. The Dad has disappeared but no one can deny that it was there, that it had returned if ever so briefly. Nick also understands that Olivia will not rest until all thirty posters are accounted for and placed in the appropriate recycling box in Anne’s garage. But what the hell, he thinks, it just may be enough that though unearned, grace can yet be stumbled upon, and occasionally what is lost, found, what was taken, returned. |
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April 2024
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