Down to dog-sit for the weekend, and on Friday, in the early evening, we went outside so the dog could sit in the front yard and observe (he was once a Brooklyn dog, and still retains, shall we say, a certain feel for the street). Fall is one of his most favorite times of the year, when all the leaves are dumped to the curb and planters are emptied out - repositories of smells, an entire year's trove of secrets.
After a half-hearted few minutes of maintenance - really, at this point, I am just waiting for the frost - I moved back to sit on the steps and took out my laptop. The dog sprawled in the middle of the yard, nose twitching, hind legs tucked behind him like packaged supermarket chicken. He suddenly began to howl: down at the curb, a plumpish little girl was standing awkwardly next to her bicycle. He kept howling; she didn't move. I admonished the dog and walked down to say hello to her. She remained motionless, just on the edge of the curb, smiling at him calmly, lips closed. I recognized that smile, the sweet friendliness of a person afraid of people, a person who trusts in dogs instead.
The Renaissance conception of children as adults-in-miniature seems monstrous until you find yourself holding a wine glass next to a quiet seven year old. I never know how to talk to children, always feel like some giant fake when I coo at babies and chirp at toddlers, the pitch of my voice oddly raised like Julia Child. What I really want to do is to be able to talk to them: listen, do you want a bottle or don't you? What are you trying to tell me? But why would you think it acceptable to bite your sister? Are you rubbing that spaghetti into your hair because you know it's funny when you do so, or because you suspect it's not and want to test me, or because you find it insufficiently al dente? I have always imagined that talking to children comes naturally for other women, certainly for parents in general, but maybe even they are fudging their way through it, merely playing adulthood: authoritative, confident, competent. I remember my mother's complaint that certain kids were "fresh," that so-and-so "really has a mouth on him." As a child, I'd assumed it was a matter of bad manners, and for her it probably was. But maybe those kids were also the ones to look at adults, discern their weaknesses, and say: I know you're bluffing.
"Sorry," I said, "he really is friendly, he just barks at strangers. But he won't bite."
"Thsnot a problem," she whispered, never taking her eyes from him. "I find him fasthinating."
"Well, and so he is," I agreed, knowing that if I was seven years old, we'd probably be friends, mutually precocious and gawky and hopeless. As it was, I had no idea what to say to this child who clearly had little intention of going anywhere, and I was acutely conscious of being a childless, unmarried woman in her thirties - already a weird thing in this suburban town - holding a half-full wineglass in the front yard while talking to a strange little kid. I imagined suspicious eyes peering from behind window curtains all up and down the block. If only I had a turban and a muumuu, I thought, to make my weirdness legit.
"Whathsithname?" she asked me. I told her and she smiled. Feeling more desperate by the second, but certain that I was supposed to take the lead in this conversation, I asked, "Do you live across the street?" "No" - she turned and pointed down the block to a house recently sold. It had belonged to peers of my parents, and the complete, shutter-hanging disarray into which it fell upon their deaths was in fact preceded for years by a general sense, when you drove by, that it was in the midst of an explosion. While the heirs struggled in the down market, the weeds and shrubs grew wild and a family of about six deer squatted on the front lawn. I imagined the eminent cardiologist across the street - his lawn precisely edged, his beds flawlessly mulched, his annuals regularly rotated out - grumbling every time he backed down his driveway.
"Ah," I said, trying to sound cheerful, "well, welcome to the neighborhood!" For the first time, she looked at me instead of the dog and seemed alarmed. It suddenly occurred to me that she probably was not aware that there was anything strange about my adulthood, per se - surely children don't notice wedding rings or their absence; I was probably an automatic "Mrs." to her. It's only the parents who must see me as some strange, adult-child hybrid, neither in one world nor the other.
I was saved by the clatter of tricycles and bicycles and soccer balls and the singsongy voices of the six to eight children who always seem to be in the driveway of the house across the street. I've no idea whom they belong to; it seems improbable that they're all siblings. The nice thing about the neighborhoods in this town is that children do travel in extra-familial packs, as though we are in some suburban outpost of communal living that ends only at bedtime.
- Except for this child, it seemed, newly arrived from wherever and reduced to talking to a wine-swilling blonde lady. She turned halfway to look at the other children, and I recognized that smile, too, that small, embarrassed twist of the lips, that shrinking inward.
"Well," I said, at an absolute loss, "I should take him inside for his dinner. It was very nice to meet you!"
"Itwathnithtomeetyoutoo," she mumbled, and with a final look at the dog, she peddled slowly down the street, away from her own house. We did indeed go inside soon after that, but as I glanced out toward the street once more, I saw her bike past our house again, looking for the dog, I guess, and I felt guilty for reasons I can't explain. It's never going to do you any good talking to us, I wanted to tell her, bluntly, as I'd advise an adult: you've got to summon up your nerve and go across the street; you've got to just fake it.
No comments:
Post a Comment